


boys on the radio

by coldhope



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Angst and Feels, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Teen Angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-24
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-05-28 17:17:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 36,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6338059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The new kid is terrible.</i>
</p>
<p><i>Hux doesn’t even know when he started here, it’s like halfway through the semester and suddenly there is this tall glowering goth kid with safety pins through the lowest set of his ear piercings and regrettable lipstick and the world’s loudest </i>fucking<i> music, it’s not even in </i>English<i> half the time, apparently making his permanent home in the metal shop. Hux wouldn’t care if he didn’t have to go through the metal shop on his way to and from the darkroom, or if the fucking darkroom itself had any soundproofing to match the velvet blackness of its lightproof door and walls. </i></p>
<p>Several weeks into the school year, eleventh-grader Hux's relatively peaceful independent-study art elective turns into an exercise in infuriation with the advent of Kylo "It's My Name, Okay" Ren and his inability to shut the fuck up. It turns out that Ren is okay with a torch, but abysmal at <i>pretty much everything else</i> --  except, well. Sometimes he makes up for it with Pop-Tarts.</p>
<p>Now with illustrations by <a href="http://kromitar.tumblr.com/">kromitar</a> and <a href="http://rraffeh.tumblr.com/">raffe</a>!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> illustrated by [kromitar](http://kromitar.tumblr.com/) (Hux and Ren) and [raffe](http://rraffeh.tumblr.com/) (Ren on his own)!

~

_Do what you want_  
_'Cause I'll do anything_  
_And I'll take the blame_

\--Hole

~

The new kid is _terrible_.

Hux doesn’t even know when he started here, it’s like halfway through the semester and suddenly there is this tall glowering goth kid with safety pins through the lowest set of his ear piercings and regrettable lipstick and the world’s loudest _fucking_ music, it’s not even in _English_ half the time, apparently making his permanent home in the metal shop. Hux wouldn’t care if he didn’t have to go through the metal shop on his way to and from the darkroom, or if the fucking darkroom itself had any soundproofing to match the velvet blackness of its lightproof door and walls. 

(He likes the little rotating-blackout-door of the darkroom. Something about it, about the airlock act of passing out of the blue into the black, leaving behind the regular world for a while, appeals to Hux. He likes the high thin reek of vinegar, acetic acid, over the other chemicals that make up the smell of this little red-black sanctum. Even when the other kids are in here, it’s still private, in a way. It is like being cozily tucked inside of someone’s heart.)

This week the new kid has been louder than ever. Hux has stayed at school in the afternoons to _work on his projects_ for several weeks now, because going from class to this limited domain of red sharp-smelling darkness is a hell of a lot better than going from class to his father’s house ( _eight thousand square feet, secure gated community, with attached golf course_ ) and spending the afternoon studying. He spends the _evenings_ studying, instead, and the afternoons here, tilting little plastic baths up and down with his forefingers, watching the wave slide back and forth across the surface, watching images appear on the blank paper as the chemicals do their work. It’s a kind of magic, although he knows perfectly well how it is done; he does not bother thinking of the chemistry and just watches the pictures appear, as if rising to the surface of some white liquid, slowly at first and then with more and more detail. 

He’d picked photography for the arts elective this semester because it sounded less messy than ceramics, the only other class that fit his schedule, and had been slightly astonished at just how much he enjoyed it right from the beginning. Hux was used to being good at things -- at least things that didn’t involve running around or carrying heavy objects -- and he turned out to be a natural at this new discipline. He had been the only kid in the class who didn’t need help developing their first roll: winding the film out of the cassette and into its spiral reel in absolute and utter darkness wasn’t exactly _easy_ , but he knew how it ought to go, and his fingers were deft and sure. He’d had the film in its light-trap tank ready to go while everyone else was still fumbling around. The teacher hadn’t actually believed he had done it correctly in that amount of time, and opened up the tank to check his work, which made Hux clench his fists in the darkness, glad no one could see his face. And then the teacher had said more quietly “Good work,” and Hux heard actual respect in her voice. 

After that, she’d taken him aside and suggested that since he was perhaps working at a different pace than the other students, she’d be willing to let him do an independent study with her for the same credit rather than continuing along with the regular curriculum, so as not to hold him back. Hux had been conscious of the other kids’ animosity, but he quite frankly didn’t care, more interested in learning how to do this thing as well as possible. When they’d moved on from the film section of the course to digital photography, Hux had been allowed to continue working on his independent study in film. He spent his free time either wandering around with a camera or holed up in here. Since the beginning of the semester the darkroom had been a blissful quiet lacuna out of time where he could just _relax_ , and now -- 

Now the new kid has jacked up the music again, some guy singing in German over a heavy electronic beat. Hux has seen the shit he’s been up to in the back room of the shop, this past week: he’s finally got the teacher to let him fuck around with the welding torch under heavy supervision, and has put together a thing apparently called _The Dark Side And The Light_ which looks to Hux like what you would get if you took a Coke can two feet tall, stomped on it, and stuck it on a pedestal. But today apparently his artistic muse has deserted him, because Hux can hear quite clearly over the music a furious counterpoint of _fuck fuck fuck shitting mother of fuck fuck fuuuuuuck._

After a few moments it stops, and Hux goes back to work. This year he’s been coming to school early, as well as staying late, now that he has his own car; and there’s a particular angle on the pond with the trees behind it in the morning light that he’s been trying to get right for the past couple of days and hasn’t been able to, and he thinks some of the shots from this morning might be closer to what he wants, and he is holding up the contact sheet in the safelight to pick frames when the music outside is suddenly turned up -- turned up high, the bass thumping hard enough to make things buzz. The air in Hux’s chest vibrates with it.

Yeah. No. 

He puts down the contact sheet and stalks out of the darkroom -- it is hard to stalk through a tiny revolving door, but he tries -- and is expecting to see the new kid...headbanging, or setting shit on fire, Hux doesn’t even know, but all he’s doing is...bending over the workbench, really close. In the outer shop, not back there where the heavy metal work goes on.

“Hey,” Hux says, or...yells, over the music. “Can you turn that shit down?”

The new kid pays no attention whatsoever: Hux might as well not even be there. His hair is pulled back from its normal disorganized tangle, exposing his entire face, not just the bits of it that are normally visible, and Hux can see that he has a scatter of little dark moles standing out against the pale skin. He is focusing very, very intently on something quite small that’s held in one of those weird tweezery clamp things, and the flame of the torch in his right hand -- the regular torch, not the oxyacetylene rig -- is tuned to a sharp blue point. In his other hand one of the jewelry shop’s alarming-looking dental picks is moving very carefully, with the torch, and Hux is reminded of doctor shows on TV, the intense concentration, the tiny implements. 

Despite himself, he watches. The dental pick makes a fractional movement relative to whatever is being held between the tweezers, and a moment later all the tension goes out of the new kid’s shoulders and he turns the torch’s thumbwheel closed with a _squeak-pop_ of gas -- and straightens up, dead torch in one hand, pick in the other, and gives Hux one of the nastiest looks he has ever been granted, by anybody, ever. 

Hux can see it when he does the little forceful nodding motion that should send the hair cascading down to cover his face, but it’s still tied back in a rubber band, and nothing happens. The smell of hot metal and flux drifts across the open air of the shop. 

The German singer finishes whatever it is he has been singing, and in the echoing, ringing space between that and the next song on the album Hux asks -- despite himself -- “What are you working on?”

~

~

Kylo Ren, whose name is _Kylo Ren_ , thank you very much, by the way, detests most things about this school except for the shop. He’d been prepared to hate _everything_ about the school, and then he’d signed up for Metal Shop I and discovered that not only did they have kind of an awesome facility here, the shop teacher Mr. Tekka was actually pretty cool and asked him a bunch of questions about his previous experience, and when he’d demonstrated that he knew his way around and wasn’t going to set fire to himself or lose any fingers, had agreed to let Ren use the shop to work on his own projects outside of class time. 

He’s gotten really into silverwork, on his own. The heavy shit is fun, he loves the sheer power of the oxyacetylene torch, holding a blade of light that can cut right through metal, and he’s working on another piece called _Balance_ that’s the toughest thing he’s ever made so far, and there’s a lot of stuff he wants to do with the forge: he’s already applying to do an independent study next semester instead of taking the regular shop class. But -- when he’s worked out the worst of his moods in heavy metal -- there’s something about the tiny fiddly shit that appeals to the perfectionist in him, and he is trying to get _hinges_ to work because if he can do hinges in sterling then he can make poison rings, and that will be _so incredibly sick_. 

Ren is actually something close to content, or as close to content as it is possible for him to get, except for that one preppy ginger motherfucker who keeps bitching about his music. He has no idea what the kid’s deal is, just that he wears _actual sweater vests_ like Mr. Rogers or something and walks around like he has a stick so far up his ass it’s hard to turn his head, and he’s always in the darkroom while Ren is working in the shop. He’s doing some kind of independent study of his own, apparently, since he’s not in with the other kids.

(Ren doesn’t get photography. Not the old-fashioned kind with film, anyhow. They had perfectly good digital cameras now and who the hell wanted to spend his entire afternoon in the dark fucking around with chemicals that didn’t even get you high? Preppy Ginger Fuck clearly doesn’t have anything even closely approximating a life.)

Right now it’s 4:30, everyone else has gone home long ago, and Ren has finished the day’s work on _Balance_ and is blasting Rammstein while he tries, again, to get his tiny silver hinges to work. The problem is that the stock he’s using to make the barrels of the hinge is so thin and fine that the temperature at which it melts and balls up is _really fucking close_ to the temperature at which the silver solder will run between it and the heavier stock he’s trying to attach the barrels to. Getting the heat just right, so that the solder melts and the thin silver doesn’t, is...challenging. 

He has already melted two attempts so far, having to shut off the torch and jump up and down yelling invective until he calmed down enough to get his hands steady, and this time he is going to fucking get it _right_. This can be done, he knows it can _be_ done, so he is going to damn well do it. 

Ren dips all the clamps and the pick in the grubby can of water on the bench to make sure they’re cool enough to work with, and sets it up again: oval piece of flat sheet stock held midair in a clamp, the position of the hinge on one side marked with scratches. He has three tiny silver barrels already shaped and ready: two of them will go on this piece, the back of a locket, with a space between them, and the third will be attached to the side of the locket’s face so that it fits between the two others with a silver pin running through all three, securing it all together. 

He dabs flux on each spot where the outer parts of the hinge will go; heats the silver from the underneath to boil it off so the bubbling stops; melts two tiny squares of silver solder on a charcoal brick, picks them up one by one with the tip of the dental pick and deposits them exactly where he wants them. He plays the blue tip of the flame’s cone underneath the silver again until each tiny blob shivers and flattens out in a bright flash of liquid metal. The torch is cut off, the sheet silver with its two solder points removed from the clamp and dropped with a hiss into the beaker of pickling acid standing on its hotplate. The whole process takes less than a minute. 

He is _going_ to fucking do this. 

After a few minutes the silver is clean, bone-white, powdery white, and he takes it out of the pickle and rinses it in water before going to set up the job properly. The piece goes back into the clamp, more flux on the solder points, boiled off again -- the bubbling of hot flux can move delicate components of a piece when you’re trying to attach them, he’d fucked up a couple pieces early on by forgetting about that -- and Ren slides the two delicate cylinders of thin silver onto the tine of a (newer, nicer) straight pick, lining them up with a gap where the third will fit between them. 

Then he pauses, turns off the torch, sets the pick down and goes over to the boombox and twists up the volume. Till Lindemann growls _die Sonne scheint mir aus den Augen, sie wird heut Nacht nicht untergehen_ loudly enough to fill the entire hollow space of the shop, fill up Ren’s bones with the music. As the chorus begins, he takes a deep breath, lights the torch again, and gets to work. 

The world narrows to this very specific point, the colors of the silver, the tip of the flame. After a few moments movement beyond his workbench tells him that someone else is present; he can just about hear words over the music, but since this has no bearing on the task at hand, it is ignored. Ren heats up the flat piece of silver gently, steadily, judging temperature by eye, and just when the points of solder are about to gleam liquid again he moves the pick in, deft and smooth, and the two thin hoops of metal make contact with the solder points -- and tremble -- and _settle_ , as the solder flows. 

_Hier kommt die Sonne._

He withdraws the pick, letting out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding, turns off the torch, and straightens up to find that he is being stared at: that the sweater-vest kid has approached quite close, while he was busy, and is now looking at him with a peculiar expression on his face. 

Ren fucking _hates_ being stared at, despite the fact that he spends a lot of time in front of the mirror making himself as noticeable as possible, eyeliner and spikes and all. He automatically shakes his hair forward into its protective curtain, but of course it’s still held back with the rubber band and nothing happens, _goddamnit_.

“...What are you working on?” Preppy Ginger Fuck wants to know, in the quiet after the song ends, and he actually kind of sounds like he _does_ want to know. Since he’s spent the entire time since Ren started working in the shop looking at him as if Ren was some type of particularly unpleasant fungus, this comes as some surprise.

“Hinges,” Ren says. Why the fuck is he talking to this kid?

“ _Hinges?_ ” It’s not incredulous, it’s -- well, maybe kind of impressed. “That’s _tiny_.”

Ren takes the piece out of its clamp and drops it into the pickle beaker, watching to see if either of the solder joints crack: both little cylinders stay firmly attached. “No shit, Sherlock,” he says. Just then the boombox erupts into _Ich Will_ , and Preppy Ginger Fuck winces like it actually hurts, and...okay, maybe it _is_ a little loud. Ren goes to turn it down, and then turns it off: he’s lost the mood, the drive, the whatever-it-is that makes him go on working on a thing. He’s done it, he’s put half of the hinge down, and that means he _can_ do it, and anyway he needs to figure out what the fuck is going to go on the front of the locket before any more work is done. He feels -- tired, and irritable, anticlimactic.

Ginger is still standing there, because apparently he can’t take hints. “Can I see?”

Ren is about to tell him to fuck off, but there had been that little flicker of _impressed_ , and right now he...kind of wants someone to recognize that he’s just done a difficult thing. He takes the silver out of the acid again -- chalk-white, it always looks so ghostly, unreal -- and rinses it before holding it out. 

Ginger takes it between thumb and forefinger, carefully, and Ren notices he has incredibly skinny wrists, like a girl’s, the bone right under the surface. He examines the silver oval, saying nothing for a few moments: long enough that Ren is about to break the silence himself, or snatch it back, when he responds with “This is the back of a locket?”

“-- Yeah. Well. It’s more like an experiment, I wanted to see if I could do it. I want to make poison rings.”

Ginger hands the piece back. “How did you make the hinge barrels?”

“Bezel wire,” he says. “Thin, flat, really flexible.”

“So they’d all automatically be the same width without having to measure,” Ginger says, nodding. “Did you make those, too?”

He’s looking at Ren’s rings. Ren has two of them on most fingers, and one on each thumb, and they represent about a month and a half’s worth of steady improvement. The great thing about silverwork is that you can walk into class and walk out again ninety minutes later with a brand-new ring on your finger, no waiting around for anything to dry or get fired. He will never understand the ceramics people, some of their shit takes _weeks_.

“Yeah,” Ren says, and almost holds out his hands for inspection before scowling fiercely and stuffing them in his pockets. Why _is_ he talking to this kid, anyway?

“You’re good,” says Ginger, finally taking the hint and backing off. “You’re actually kind of...really good. But the music’s too loud. I wouldn’t care except for there’s no soundproofing in the darkroom.”

“So wear headphones,” Ren tells him, hands still jammed in his pockets. “Listen to your...whatever that classical shit is you play.”

Ginger rolls his eyes. “Yeah, right, I need to wear headphones because you need to be an inconsiderate dick and incidentally damage your hearing _and_ mine?”

“Pretty much,” says Ren. 

They’re weird eyes. Ren hasn’t seen anyone with actual orange eyelashes before, at least up close: it makes the blue-grey really stand out. Right now they’re narrowed at him with -- oh, _there_ it is, there’s the _you’re a fungus_ look. Ren narrows his right back: _and you’re an asshole_. “What’s your name, anyway?” Ginger asks. 

“Ren,” he says. “Kylo Ren.”

It _still_ sounds really cool. And...gets another eyeroll from Ginger. “What?” Ren demands. “What’s yours?”

“Hux,” says the kid, and Ren snickers. 

“‘Hux,’ for real? Man, middle school must have been a fucking nightmare for you.” The breadth and scope of potential horrible nicknames is impressive. 

“Yeah,” Hux says, “it was. Just keep the volume down.”

He walks away -- no, Ren thinks, _stalks_ away, that is actual stalking going on there -- and disappears back into the revolving darkroom door. 

Ren packs up his stuff, locking the sheet stock away in Mr. Tekka’s office, closing the tank valve on the torch, turning off the hotplate under the pickle beaker. With a last look round, he slouches out of the shop to go wait for his ride, not entirely sure why he is feeling like quite such an asshole and not liking it in the least.

~


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> illustrated by [kromitar](http://kromitar.tumblr.com/)!

_What's mine is yours_  
_You can have all of it_  
_And I'll learn to beg_

\--Hole

 

Two weeks later: it’s still just about warm enough at midday to eat lunch outside, on the upper level of the deck by the pond. Hux has a coat on; his friend Phasma is still in shorts and T-shirt, sitting on top of the table with her long legs folded neatly under her, eating a sandwich. For the past fifteen minutes Hux has been complaining about Kylo Ren, whose real name is not in fact Kylo Ren at all, and now his Cup o’ Noodles has gone cold. 

He pokes at it, makes a face, and sets it aside. Phasma sighs at him. “Here,” she says, and hands over a granola bar from her own lunchbag, as she has so many times before. 

She is the captain of the girls’ lacrosse team, six feet tall, a broad-shouldered seventeen-year-old who is already resigned to a lifetime of comments on her height, and nobody seems to understand that one of the reasons she’s friends with the weird arrogant history-nerd kid is that he _never talks about it_. They had met on the first day of ninth grade bio: she’d been sitting beside him when lab partners were assigned, and he had turned to her, looked up at her, quite a long way up -- Phasma had been expecting _wow, you’re tall_ , or worse, _wow, you’re tall for a girl_ , or the mildly accusatory _how tall ARE you_ \-- and said “Hi. I’m Hux.”

She could pick him up and carry him around under one arm like a football, if she felt so inclined, and Hux knew it perfectly well, and perhaps because of that he had never developed the violently awkward self-conscious insecurity that other boys tended to in her presence. The lab partnership had developed into an actual friendship by the second week of class, and they ate lunch together almost every day. He noticed when she started packing extra granola bars in her lunch, after the third or fourth time she’d given him hers. It was a small and unasked-for kindness that he had appreciated quite a lot, and still appreciates. He takes the one she offers now.

“Are you going to ask me to punch him?” she asks. “Because I will. I will totally punch this kid, if it’ll get you to shut up about him.”

Hux laughs. “No. I’m tempted, but no.” He unwraps the granola bar -- she always has the good kind, the ones that have peanut butter on the bottom -- and gets through half of it before returning to the subject. He talks with his hands, emphasizing each point with gestures: fragments of granola litter the deck. “It’s just...he’s so _annoying_ , either he won’t shut up and he’s completely obnoxious or he just sits there like a lump and radiates Sullen Discontent, like you can practically see little _fuck-you_ rays coming off of him. I don’t know which is worse, the talking or the not talking.” 

“So quit hanging out with him. Stop giving him rides home from school,” Phasma says, balling up the wrapper from her sandwich and tossing it accurately into the trash can eight feet away: nothing but net. “Problem solved.”

Hux doesn’t even know why he _started_. Well -- okay, he does, it had seemed like a good idea at the time: about a week ago he’d finished up after Ren had already left the shop, and was on his way out to the parking lot when he noticed a glum black-draped figure sitting on one of the benches under the carpool overhang: it was almost six p.m., already dark at this time of year, raining, and chilly. Very chilly. 

It turned out Ren’s mom was stuck at work and couldn’t come get him for another hour, and since they were locked out of the school building and Hux’s fingertips were beginning to go numb with cold he had just said “Stay there” and gone to pull his car around. Ren hadn’t moved from the bench, and Hux had to lean on the horn before he finally got up and shuffled over. 

“What the fuck?” Ren said, when Hux rolled the silver Mercedes SLK’s window down, staring at him. 

“Get in, asshole, I’ll drive you home.”

“ _This_ is your car?”

“Yes,” Hux said. “Obviously.”

“This is _your_ car?”

“Did I stutter? Get in, you’re getting rain on the seat.”

He could feel his ears going pink, and stared straight ahead as Ren finally got in, baggy black pants and hoodie and torn-up patch-covered bookbag and all. The pants were covered in dangling, pointless chains and straps. Hux delicately removed one from the shift knob. “Where do you live?” he said.

“I can’t believe this is your fucking car,” Ren said. “Since when are you rich?”

“I’m not. My father is. Where do you _live_?”

Ren named a suburb not that far from Arkanis Meadows, Hux’s own development. He was still staring around at the interior, and ran a grubby finger over the edge of the dash like a mother-in-law checking the mantelpiece for dust.

“Okay,” Hux said, managing not to wince as Ren left a black smear of buffing compound on the trim. “I know where that is.” He put the SLK in gear and pulled out of the carpool lane, taking the school’s long speedbump-ridden driveway _carefully_ in the dark. It was -- weird, having Kylo Ren right next to him, _watching_ him, and Hux tried not to let on that he was aware of being watched: it was somewhat of a relief to have to concentrate on driving. 

“So what else have you been hiding, Richie Rich?” Ren inquired, after a little while. “I gotta say, you don’t _act_ like someone who drives a car like this. I had you pegged as a Camry man. Beige Camry. Maybe that little pathetic spoiler on the trunk to pretend like you’re hip and with-it after all.”

“I didn’t pick it out,” said Hux shortly.

“Oh,” said Ren, and then “ _Oh_. Oh my fucking God, did you get this as a present? For your _birthday_? For your sixteenth birthday? Is that what this is? Holy shit, I’m riding in an actual _cliché_ , this is incredible.”

Hux stared grimly at the road. Beside him Ren gurgled with laughter. “Did it have a bow on it? Big red bow like in the movies?’

“No. Nor did the keys come in a little gift box with a bow on top. You want to walk home or what?”

“Fuck no, I’m cruising inside a TV Trope, this is golden. Wait, so do you have, like, a butler? With a classy accent?”

“No,” said Hux again, changing down for a curve. “Shut up, okay?”

“So how many cars do you have? Is this the one you always take to school to impress people? Cause I got to say you are kind of letting the car down here, in terms of personal style. The sweater-vest thing is just not Mercedes-Benz. Or do you have like six others that you keep for different days of the week?”

“Yes,” he snapped. “Actually it’s _ten_. I have ten other cars. And three helicopters, one of which has a fucking waterbed in it, what do you _want_ me to say?”

Ren laughed so hard he snorted. Hux was glad it was dark: his face was burning hot. It wasn’t far to this _complete douchebag_ ’s stupid house and when Hux got home he could wipe off the black fingerprint-smear on his dashboard and pretend _this had never happened at all_. Ever. 

Still laughing helplessly, Ren wiped at his face. “Fuck,” he said. “You made my eyeliner run. Also you can’t put a _waterbed_ in a _helicopter_ , asshole, don’t be ridiculous.”

“Yes you can,” he said, and then something in his chest seemed to tip over and suddenly it _was_ funny. “You just have to push real hard. _Asshole_.”

That sent Ren off into further hysterics, and Hux found himself laughing too, and wondered when the last time was that he’d actually done that -- and steered his mind away from that particular path with the ease of long practice. 

The rest of the ride passed without incident, and he pulled up in front of a small nondescript house and watched until Ren got the front door open before continuing on his way. 

That had been the first time. The second time was worse. The second time Ren had apparently taken it upon himself to provide a running commentary on not only the SLK’s interior design, but Hux’s driving and the car’s performance as well, and he had come very, very close to pulling over and booting Ren out, bookbag and all, into the rain. Ren had still been snickering at his own comic genius when Hux dropped him off, and that time Hux had had to pull over on the way home and do a bit of yelling, on his own, in the dark private confines of the empty car. He had felt better after a few minutes, resting his forehead on the steering wheel, and when he thought he could probably make it the rest of the way home without piling into a tree or fellow motorist, pulled back onto the road -- but those few minutes had not been anything close to pleasant. 

The third time Ren had been waiting for him. He had detached himself from the pillar he’d been leaning against as Hux stalked by, and said “Hey, wait up,” and Hux had been so surprised he actually did stop and turn around. 

“What do you want?” he demanded.

“You’re my ride home, Huxley.”

“Fuck you.” Hux couldn’t forget the gleeful voice the previous night, going on and on and _on_. “I did you a favor, twice. That’s it.”

“C’mon, my mom’s gonna be at work till like eight, you can’t leave me here.”

“Watch me.” Hux stalked off, and was annoyed -- but unsurprised -- that Ren walked as fast as he did. Then again Ren was mostly leg, under the stupid chain-festooned pants. 

“Who pissed in your Cheerios?” Ren inquired, as if he had no earthly reason to know. Hux stopped again, turned to face him, and stared into his face -- stared a little _up_ , because among Ren’s many, many infuriating attributes was the fact that he was taller than Hux. 

“Are you serious?” he snapped. “You think you can -- spend twenty minutes sitting in my car last night and being the most insufferable fucking douchebag it is possible to _be_ , and then just show up the next day like it never happened at all and expect me to forget about it? Do you, in fact, have _any_ redeeming characteristics other than ‘sometimes I stop talking’?” 

A hot, sharp wash of gratification flooded through him at the change in Ren’s expression. And then...drained away, as fast as it had come, leaving a sort of sickness in its wake, because Hux _recognized_ the look half-hidden behind the hair. He’d seen it often enough in the mirror: a kind of dull aching misery that made everything seem subtly heavier than it ought to be, as if gravity had been turned up. It was only visible for a moment or two, before Ren got his normal fuck-you sneer back into place, but it had been there: he had seen it. 

Hux sighed, the stiffness going out of his shoulders, and took out his keys. “Shit,” he said, starting to walk again. “Okay. Fine. Come on.”

Ren stayed where he was. Hux looked over his shoulder. “You coming or what?”

Through the hair Hux thought he looked a little flushed. “No,” he said.

“You’re seriously going to sit around here until eight PM.” It was already cold.

A nod. 

“You’ll freeze your ass off. Come on, get in the fucking car already.” He sighed again, heavily, and leaned against the SLK’s door. “Look -- I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that, it was out of line.” And why was _he_ now in the position of apologizing to _Ren_ , how had that even happened, but Hux was tired and cold and not in the mood to stand around arguing just now. Finally Ren shoved his hands into his pockets and slouched his way on over, getting in without a word. 

He spent the entire trip silently fiddling with his rings, and occasionally looking over at Hux’s hands on the wheel and shift knob, not at his face; and when they pulled up in front of his house he got out still in silence -- and right before he closed the door, leaned back in, face completely invisible behind the hair, and muttered “Thanks.”

Hux was about to say something like _it speaks!_ but just sighed, again, and nodded. He was doing a lot of sighing, these days. It wasn’t like him.

He watched Ren’s progress up to the front door, and then drove away. 

The next day Ren had been waiting for him in the same place, and Hux had simply nodded toward the car with a feeling of inevitability. They’d made the trip without talking; he’d had a Mozart piano concerto playing on the SLK’s stereo, and Ren had actually asked “can I turn this off” before reaching for the volume knob. 

“Fine,” Hux said, resigning himself to another awkward silent twenty minutes. He was getting more used to Ren _watching_ him drive, watching his hands on the controls, even if it was still kind of creepy. 

He wasn’t at all sure what had possessed him to tell Ren “Wait,” when he was getting out, but he’d said it, and then forged ahead. “Look. This place is on my way to school. I could stop to pick you up in the morning, if you wanted to get in earlier and get some shop time before class.”

Ren stared at him, and actually tucked a lock of hair behind one ear in order to stare more efficiently. The eyeliner really was ridiculous: he had big dark eyes, thick-lashed as a girl’s, and the smudgy black lines made them look even bigger, and why Hux was noticing this he could not for the life of him imagine. “Or not,” he said, feeling his ears go pink. 

“No,” said Ren, slowly. “That’d...be cool.”

“Okay then. I’ll come by at seven.”

“Seven-fifteen.”

“Fine, _seven-fifteen_ , jeez.”

Ren got out, and Hux noticed that the hair was still tucked behind his ear: he hadn’t shaken it forward into its normal curtain. He slouched off up the walk to the front door without further comment. 

That had been three days ago, and Hux hadn’t actually expected Ren to be a) awake and b) ready and waiting when he pulled up in front of the house yesterday; but there he had been, hair still damp, and spent the ride to school eating a cold Pop-Tart and getting sprinkles and crumbs all over Hux’s upholstery. Today the Pop-Tart had been strawberry. 

Hux knows that, because Ren had broken off the half he hadn’t bitten into and silently offered it, and Hux had just as silently taken it, and it had tasted _sweet_. Sweet.

He looks up to find Phasma watching him with a patient kind of smile, and hastily finishes the rest of the granola bar, reflecting that he should probably start buying other people food at this rate to even out the karmic balance. Not that he believes in that sort of thing. 

But still. 

 

~

Today Kylo Ren is not waiting for him outside in the carpool lane, because it’s too fucking cold -- they were threatening sleet on the forecast -- and Ren doesn’t feel like standing around outside if he doesn’t _have_ to. So he’s still in the shop, packed up and ready, waiting for Hux to emerge from the darkroom. Apparently Hux has taken his advice and bought himself some noise-canceling headphones after all, because although Ren has pushed the boombox volume to where he _knows_ it really bothers Hux, several times over the past few days, he hasn’t been able to make Hux stop whatever he’s doing in there and come out. 

When he finally does appear, Ren thinks _about damn time_. Hux always does this kind of squinty wince thing when the light hits his eyes that makes Ren think of vampires hissing at the sun, only whoever heard of a vampire with orange eyelashes? Or _sweater-vests_ , come to think of it. 

Ren snickers at the mental image of vampire dweebs, and Hux looks over and does an actual doubletake, which makes Ren snicker more. “What are you still doing in here?” he asks. 

“Waiting for you, what does it look like? It’s cold out.”

Hux is fetching his coat from the hook behind the door -- it’s hilarious, the coat, it’s super-long, heavy dark wool that must have cost a stupid amount of money, and it makes him look like a very small dictator. Ren thinks he needs one of those big furry Russian hats to balance it out. “I noticed,” Hux says. “Did you finish that thing you were working on?”

The bench looks significantly tidier than it usually does, because a lot of the tools Ren has been using for several days have been put neatly away. “Yeah,” he says. It’s in the Altoids tin in one of his many pockets, where he keeps loose stones and silver-solder sheets. 

“Can I see?” Hux comes over, coat and all. It has to have some crazy shoulderpads, Ren thinks, because he is so not actually that shape underneath. 

“...I guess.” He takes out the tin -- the sharp smell of peppermint overpowering the pickle and flux and metal in the air -- and for the second time holds this piece out to Hux. It’s...not what he really had in mind, in the beginning, but he’d realized pretty quickly that his original idea was unworkable: the hinge was simply too delicate to support the weight of a big heavy stone. Instead of a single cabochon, therefore, the oval domed silver face of the locket has a kind of delicate freehand swirl drawn with a fine dremel grinding bit, and along this swirl are a scatter of positive and negative shapes: little openings cut in the silver, chased spirals, tiny round blue-violet iolite cabochons in bezels, and various sizes of silver balls. 

(Ren thinks commercially stamped bezel cups are cheating, but when you’re working this small, sometimes the pre-made shit just looks better, and the thin silver burnishes more evenly.) 

Hux is staring at it, tilting it in his fingers, looking at the completed hinge, at the catch Ren has made out of a loop of wire and another silver ball. He opens it, very carefully, and examines the inside as well. Then he looks up -- not at Ren, but past him, into the back room where the forge and welding rigs live, where Ren’s metal sculpture _Balance_ is taking shape -- and back down to the thing in his hand. 

Ren has his hair down in its fully deployed configuration, and is very glad of it -- obscurely glad of it -- when Hux does look at him. “What?” he demands, taking the locket back in a hurry and replacing the closed tin safely in his pocket. 

“You. You’re bizarre,” Hux tells him. “That’s _really good_ , what you did with that locket. Like, ‘people would pay big money for it in a shop’ good. How did you know to do that, with the, the swirls and the little blue jewels and stuff, did you draw that out on paper first?”

Ren shrugs, still glad of the hair: his ears feel hot. “Nah,” he says. “I just kinda freehanded it. Had the idea, went to the jewelry supply store last weekend, they had little iolite cabs and I thought they’d work okay. This is rough, the next piece I do will be way better.”

“ _So_ bizarre,” says Hux, and picks up his bookbag, which is a _satchel_ , an actual satchel, exactly like normal people do not own or carry. Ren thinks he probably got it at Sharper Image, or maybe Skymall. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

So far this has been the longest actual conversation they’d had since the confrontation in the parking lot, and Ren finds that he doesn’t want it to stop. He turns off the lights in the shop and pulls the door closed behind them. 

For someone that un-athletic-looking Hux sure as hell walks fast. Ren can easily keep up with him, but the pace had been a little surprising, at first. Hux stalks, and Ren lopes along with him, through the empty hallways of the school. 

The first time Hux had driven him home he had just simply not been able to get over the hilarious fucking juxtaposition between the kid and his wheels. He hadn’t had any real idea _what_ to expect, but a super-expensive sleek Mercedes two-seater was definitely not the kind of car he would have associated with a person who apparently parted his hair with the aid of a ruler and voluntarily wore sweater-vests. The revelation that Hux was, in fact, filthy rich had tickled Ren immensely.

So had the fact that Hux was getting steadily redder and more infuriated as Ren went on. There was something about cracking that cold superior _you’re a fungus_ attitude that had felt...exhilarating, to Ren. He recognized it, even as it was happening, the kind of self-feeding spiral of _how far can I push this person_ that had landed him in trouble fuck knew how many times before, but he couldn’t _stop_ , and then Hux had snapped at him, something ridiculous about helicopters, and -- glory be -- had actually laughed himself. Briefly. And Ren’s urge to go on needling him had passed off, like a summer thundershower.

But the next day Ren hadn’t been able to stop himself _at all_ , totally on a roll, riffing off everything from the way Hux shifted gears to the design of the instrument cluster, and he’d actually wanted Hux to snap, kind of: wanted him to… _react_. Instead he’d just acted like Ren wasn’t even there. Like nothing he said mattered at all. 

(Afterward Ren would think about how pale his knuckles had been on the shift knob, the bone glowing white just beneath the skin.)

And then the next afternoon Hux _had_ snapped at him, hard, and it had been kind of...awful, actually. Like being savaged by a cat you thought liked you, or at least tolerated your presence. He’d asked the one question Ren didn’t have any answers to, and his face had been all sharp angles and narrow vicious eyes, and Ren hadn’t been able to hide his reaction -- _dammit, fuckdammit_ \-- and then all the anger seemed to drain out of him and he’d just wearily nodded at his stupid car and said _come on_. And the tired capitulation was _way the hell worse_ than the anger. Ren was very good at recognizing when people were putting up with him, and hated it like poison. 

But it was cold, and he didn’t want to hang out here alone for like two and a half hours in the dark, so he had made himself get into Hux’s car. 

And watched him drive. He drove like a grown-up, Ren thought, and it was weird to see on someone his own age. He even used his goddamn turn signals. There was no noisy revving or peeling out of stops, despite the fact that this car could probably beat anything it liked off a stopline. He didn’t even speed, kept it five to ten above the limit at most. There was something weirdly satisfying about watching him -- and Ren had found himself staring, and known Hux had noticed him staring, and spent the rest of the trip home looking firmly out the window. 

He had spent the next day in an uncharacteristic kind of apprehension, not sure what to expect, and it had been such a relief when Hux stalked past and just nodded toward the car. 

When Hux had offered to pick him up in the morning, as well as drive him home after school, it had been completely unexpected -- so completely that he’d just stared for a few moments too long, long enough that Hux’s annoyed-and-embarrassed flush had come back. This time Ren hadn’t _meant_ it to. 

They had still apparently not been on speaking terms, beyond “put your seatbelt on” and later in the day “did you see the other shopvac anywhere” and “is Mr. Tekka’s office locked.” And then this morning he’d offered Hux half his Pop-Tart, and stolen a glance at him afterward, and the look on his face as he licked sugar off his fingers had made something tight and uncomfortable in Ren’s chest let go. 

He can’t stop himself, now, as he climbs into Hux’s car, from running a finger along the edge of the dash. “This thing should have a name,” he tells Hux. “This car. You should name it.”

Hux rolls his eyes. “Do you name everything?”

“Not _everything_ ,” Ren says. 

“The torch. Did you give the torch a name?”

“Vera.”

“...Vera.”

“Like in --”

“ _Firefly_. Yeah. Jesus Christ, Ren. You are such a fucking nerd.”

“I’m conversant with the history of popular culture,” Ren corrects him. “Anyway, you got the reference, you’re just as big of a nerd. In fact you’re kind of like the ultimate nerd, you dress like -- well, like that, and you know all the AP history quiz answers off the top of your head like it’s no big deal, and you do _photography_ , I mean seriously, the only way you could nerd any harder is if you were into Linux or something.”

“Who says I’m not?” Hux asks drily, making the turn onto the main road and shifting up smoothly, second to third in one fluid motion, then into fourth, pushing the stick forward with the flattened oval top cupped in his hand, backward with just his fingertips. Ren tries not to watch.

“--Oh shit,” he says, really glad of the distraction. “ _Are_ you a Linux person? Am I in a car with a Linux person right now?”

“As it happens, no, I don’t know shit about computer programming. But I might have.” 

He looks over at Ren, with a smirk -- hey, look at that, Huxley is capable of smirking -- and Ren blows hair out of his face and glowers at the car’s roof. “I am so naming your stupid car now. Just for that. I’m gonna come up with the dumbest spaceship name I can imagine, dumber than _Firefly_ , and _give it to this car_.”

“Yeah,” Hux says, rolling his eyes. “Whatever. Do your worst.”

Kylo Ren, _which is seriously his actual name okay_ , grins.

~


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> illustrated by [kromitar](http://kromitar.tumblr.com/)!

_I want what's yours_  
_Oh I'd give anything_  
_And I'll take the pain_

\--Hole

 

The cafeteria: the farthest corner of the cafeteria, as distant and distanced as it is possible to get from the rest of the crowded busy space. It is now much too cold to eat lunch outside, even in his coat and with his gloves on. Hux feels the cold more than most people, and the fact that Phasma had still been going around in shorts as recently as last week makes him shudder. It’s now settled into the high thirties, with the threat of snow later on, and Phasma is busy elsewhere so he is ensconced alone at his corner table with a book and a styrofoam cup of arguably-food, reading about the factors underlying totalitarian political ideologies and paying zero attention to the world around him. Which is why he jumps quite high when somebody drops a heavy bookbag on the table. 

Hux manages not to spill instant noodles on himself or the book, and looks up to see Kylo Ren smirking at him. “This the Home for Terminally Nerdy Children Memorial Table or can anybody sit here?” Ren demands.

He looks, as far as Hux can tell, pleased with himself. Hux wonders why. “You want the Total Dickheads table, three down and to the left,” he says, pointing with his pencil. “It’s crowded, you’ll have to fight for a spot, but I’m sure you’ll manage.”

Ren ignores this sally, and hauls over a chair from the nearest table -- its feet screeching horribly on the floor -- turns it around, and sits down with his folded arms on the chair-back. “So this is where you eat lunch,” he says. 

“Sometimes. It’s too cold for the deck.”

“The deck?”

“There’s a couple of picnic tables on the upper level that nobody uses much. We go there when it’s nice out.”

“Who’s we?” Ren wants to know. 

“My friend and I,” Hux says, stirring the half-finished cup of instant noodles and deciding he’s had enough. “Why?”

“Just curious.” Ren moves his bookbag aside and sets down two objects on the table: Snickers ice cream bars, obviously just bought from the cafeteria line. “I didn’t think you had friends, Huxley.”

“Did I say friends plural? Don’t call me Huxley, and is that actually what you’re eating for lunch?”

Ren has unwrapped one of the ice cream bars and takes a huge bite, something vaguely akin to bliss on the bits of his face Hux can see behind the hair. There’s another new ring on his right hand, a banded dark-orange stone in a weirdly fluid abstract setting Hux wouldn’t mind getting a better look at. “--Yeah, why?” Ren asks, and Hux thinks he doesn’t actually notice when he pushes his free hand through the curtain of hair, dragging it back and away from his face for the moment before it flops back into position. 

“Ice cream bars for lunch,” Hux says.

“So?”

“Is that what you eat every day?”

“Sometimes,” Ren says, and eyes him across the table. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t. I’m just kind of fascinated.”

Ren has finished the first of the Snickers, and flicks the balled-up wrapper at Hux, telegraphing it sufficiently that Hux can bat it aside. “Okay, Spock,” he says. “Anyhow, look who’s talking.” He points at the abandoned cup of instant noodles, barely half-finished. “That’s _your_ lunch?”

“That’s different,” Hux says, shortly. “Was there something you wanted?”

“I was bored. And you’re not usually here, in the lunchroom. I saw you over here and wondered if hell had frozen over or something, just needed to come by and check.”

Hux rolls his eyes. “Yeah, there are pigs to be seen in the sky. Sometimes if we can, we’ll find an empty classroom to eat lunch in instead of this place, but it’s not always easy.”

“We,” says Ren, again.

“Yeah, I told you. My friend, singular. I have one friend. Feel free to go ahead and get all the jokes out of the way now, to save time.”

“Who’s actually _your_ friend?” Ren asks, and then -- weirdly, almost seems to wince. “I mean. Just. I don’t see you hanging out with people. You are not a people person.”

Hux raises an eyebrow at him. “My God. I never realized. Thank you so much for pointing it out, this changes everything.”

Ren goes visibly pink for a moment. “Yeah, well --”

“My _friend_ , singular,” Hux says, before he can go any further, “is brilliant as well as being the captain of the girls’ lacrosse team. You would probably know her if she saw her, she’s --”

“-- The amazon type?” Ren asks. “That chick who’s like eight feet tall and obviously lifts?”

“Her name is Phasma.” Hux fixes him with a cold look. “Be as much of an asshole to _me_ as you like, but don’t even think about pulling that shit with her.”

“She hangs out with _you_?”

“Astonishingly, yes,” Hux says. “You want to talk yourself out of a ride home tonight, you are doing _just fine_ , Ren.”

“Jeez, why do you gotta take everything so fucking personally,” Ren says, licking the inside of the second empty ice-cream wrapper. “So what’re you reading?”

“I don’t think it’d entertain you,” Hux says, and realizes immediately that this is exactly the wrong thing to say, because Ren is scraaaaaaaping his chair around the circumference of the table to peer over Hux’s shoulder at the book. “-- Dammit, Ren,” he says, and then “Is that a new ring?”

Ren blinks, looking from the book to his face. “Huh?”

“Second on your right ring finger. I haven’t seen that one before.”

“Oh. Uh. Yeah, that’s from last night, I just finished it today.” His thumbnails are polished glass-bright from the buffing wheel: he must have just come from the shop. “I fucked it up a lot and then kind of...ended up using the fucked-upness as a design element, like, _yeah I totally meant to do that_.”

He holds out the fingers of the hand in question, and Hux bends over to peer at it. The setting is abstract, yes, but flowing: it makes him think of bending magnetic field lines described in half-round sterling wire. The stone is a translucent banded agate cabochon set in an open-backed bezel, so the silver beneath can be seen through the agate -- and the pattern of the metal lines up with the pattern of banding in the stone. Lines up perfectly. 

Ren has put a few tiny silver balls here and there caught between the three pieces of wire that make up the ring’s structure, like pebbles in a stream. “That, um. Was supposed to be symmetrical,” Ren says, taking the hand away. “Then I melted it. Wasn’t paying enough attention. I kept it because I figured I could at least use the stock for something else, and then today I was looking at it again and I thought it actually was kind of neat-looking. And then it turned out that one of my stones had that pattern, and...yeah.” He stops talking, and hunches his shoulders slightly, as if he hadn’t quite meant to go on for that long.

“It’s fantastic,” Hux says, because it is. 

Ren un-hunches.

“Symmetry is boring, anyway. No, really, I mean it,” Hux adds, because Ren looks as if he’s about to interrupt. “It’s like...they teach you about that, as an actual element of composition. You can _make_ it interesting if you put work into it, but it’s inherently static, where asymmetry is naturally dynamic.” 

Ren peers at him, and tucks the hair behind an ear, revealing a good sixty percent of his face: at this range, the effect of big dark eyes rimmed with uneven black liner is kind of...really noticeable. Hux blinks. “What?” he says, sounding strange even to himself. 

“You talk like a textbook,” Ren says. He’s either wearing mascara, too, or he just has truly ridiculous eyelashes. “Do you, like, actually memorize this shit, or does it just come naturally?”

“Fuck you,” Hux tells him, and Ren _smiles_. 

Just for a second, but that’s long enough for the expression to be registered and sealed in Hux’s mind: it lights Ren’s whole face, changes him into someone slightly different. He hadn’t actually imagined that Kylo Ren was capable of smiling like this, at least not without the aid of heavy drugs -- and then it vanishes again, to be replaced with a slightly lighter version of Ren’s permascowl. 

“Eloquent, Huxley,” Ren says, getting up and shouldering his bookbag. “See you later, right?”

Hux feels as if something has just happened, though he has no idea exactly what. “Yeah,” he says, blinking, and notices with exquisite clarity that Ren _untucks_ the hair from his ear as he turns away from the table, letting it fall back over his face. Hux is reminded of opening an umbrella, or pulling down a welding-helmet visor: deploying a protective shield against a harsh environment. 

 

~

Ren thinks: _No wonder he’s so fucking skinny._

Hux had been half-hidden behind his giant history book, tucked away at a table in a corner of the lunchroom where the overhead fluorescent tubes had burned out, casting grey shadows over the stacked chairs against the wall. The round Formica tables were big enough for seven or eight kids to sit around, but Hux had been completely alone with his book. Ren had only noticed him because of the orange hair, bright against the shadows of the corner. There were other kids with orange hair, but none of them apparently parted it with the aid of a set-square, and all of _them_ had friends. 

When Ren dropped his bookbag on the table he’d been gratified to see Hux jump quite high, one thin hand darting out to steady the instant noodles even as he scowled up at Ren. It had been a little weird to see Hux doing something as ordinary as eating lunch: he’d only ever really seen him stalking around the halls or behind the wheel of his stupid car. (Which Ren still has to figure out a name for.) They don’t have any classes together except AP Euro History, and Ren always sits in the very back of that one doodling on his sneakers with a sharpie; Hux is front and center, facing the whiteboard with his hands clasped on the desk, answering every question without apparent effort. 

(Ren kind of wonders sometimes if he knows how much the other kids hate him, and then thinks: how can he _not?_ )

But there Hux had been, with a brick-thick textbook on political history, in the actual lunchroom, eating actual lunch. Ren had kind of vaguely imagined he’d have a classy-as-fuck picnic basket with real plates and linen tablecloths and silverware, maybe with those little fancy sandwiches the size of a dorito -- what did rich people _actually_ eat, anyway, caviar? -- but Hux had been about halfway through a Cup o’ Noodles, just like anybody. Not that he’d finished it. 

Ren has English after lunch, and settles in his usual place in the back of that classroom, too -- he tends to get to class just a little early, to ensure that he can find a seat right in the back row, preferably in the corner -- and finds himself eyeing his new ring. 

_Symmetry is boring_ , Hux had said. Well...yeah, okay, that is actually true, Ren admits to himself. He’s not actually sure why he mentally defaults to symmetrical design, but he wouldn’t have come up with this kind of flowy abstract shit himself in a million years, even if it does look awesome. Because yeah, Hux was right about that too: it _is_ fantastic. He tilts his hand, watching light catch and slide around the lines of silver, glow in the banded depths of the stone. 

Hux had looked weird, right before he left, kind of distracted, like he’d just thought of something important. Ren tries to remember what he’d actually said, something about _did Hux memorize this shit or just come up with it off the top of his head_ , and Hux had said _Fuck you_ , and something about that had just tickled Ren intensely. It was the -- contrast, maybe, between the pale pointed face and the words, or the kind of mild casual tone he used. 

Ren slouches further down in the seat, hair covering one eye completely, and proceeds to sketch out designs while the other kids shuffle into the classroom. He’s okay enough with the hinge business now that he thinks he can actually use it on the smaller scale of a ring, and he’s itching to get started. 

~

He can’t get started. 

Ren sits at the shop counter after school and glowers at the contents of his Altoids tin: three more oval agate cabs, one much larger hematite that he got for cheap because there’s a chip out of one side, a couple of tiny lapis rounds, some larger moonstones. He can’t figure out if he wants to use one of the agates for the poison ring, and if so which one -- does he want to keep the nicest of the three in reserve and use one of the more boring stones for this first attempt, which is not gonna be perfect, or is that kind of a copout? And he can’t really get behind the _abstract_ thing: his instinct is to go for balanced symmetry, even though when this is even slightly less than perfect it always looks like shit. _Amateurish_ shit. 

(Ren is not good at being bad at the things he wants to do. Or at having patience with his own learning curve. It’s a problem.) 

Maybe Hux could help, he thinks. Lend another viewpoint. All that shit about compositional elements and, what, static versus dynamic: he might be useful. Even if Ren is likely to do exactly the opposite of whatever he suggests, for reasons. 

He reaches over and turns up the music. Lindemann’s voice fills the shop: _Tiefe Brunnen muss man graben, wenn man klares Wasser will._ Ren turns around to watch the darkroom door. He hasn’t been able to smoke Hux out with music _consistently_ for a while now, but hey, maybe it’ll work this time. 

Nothing happens. And nothing happens when he turns it up again -- and then again, to the point where it’s actually hurting Ren’s own ears. Still no sign of a pissed-off ginger dweeb in a sweater-vest. 

Ren watches a dental pick buzz its way along the counter, jumping to the beat, and abruptly turns the boombox off. The sudden silence rings like a struck glass, dizzying. 

A vague, formless kind of unease is gathering in him. The chemicals in the darkroom can’t...hurt a person, can they? Like, breathing that shit in isn’t gonna do you any harm, right, because otherwise who would let kids fuck around with it all unsupervised?

_Who would let a kid fuck around with fire and metal all unsupervised_ , Ren thinks, looking at the torch hose snaking up from the tank to the handle in its rack. _That’s dangerous too._

He sits there tapping his fingers on the counter for a couple more minutes, one leg jiggling, and then with a muttered _jesus fuck_ gets up and crosses the shop to the darkroom door. 

Ren has never actually been in here. It’s...a revolving door like in a hotel, only instead of brass and glass everything is made out of _black_ : black felt, or something like it, and he has to push against some resistance to get it to move at all. A jab of sharp unexpected claustrophobia rises from his stomach as the light of the shop is completely blotted out, everything reduced to total black closeness, very close, _too close_ , pressing against him -- and then the black wall opens on red light and a smell of vinegar.

He steps out of the kind-of-horrible door, blinking. Somewhere an unseen fan is whirring, and he can feel air drawn past his face. There are workbenches along one wall with a row of big microscope-looking things, and pieces of clothesline stretch across the room with pictures hanging from them like laundry. To Ren’s right there is another long bench covered in paper towels, with big jugs of chemicals arranged on a shelf above it. The far wall is taken up with a line of industrial sinks, and Hux is standing at one of these, wearing an apron, washing something. In the red light his hair looks colorless, pale, unremarkable. And he is...wearing headphones. 

Ren stares. They are expensive headphones, and there is a little telltale light glowing on each can. He can remember telling Hux to get some fucking noise-cancelling earbuds or something, he wasn’t turning down his music for the sake of some asshole who can’t appreciate good dance metal.

Abruptly Ren is -- angry, in an unpleasant confused sort of way, not sure exactly what or who he is angry _with_. He crosses the room to the sink where Hux is standing, and notices that in fact Hux is kind of...grooving, ever so slightly, to whatever he’s listening to; swaying a little, his hips moving from side to side. This is astonishing enough to blank out the anger for a little while, and he just watches Hux move for a moment longer before stepping forward and tapping him on the shoulder. 

The result is immediate and entirely gratifying: Hux jerks sharply away from his hand, dropping the piece of paper he’s been rinsing under the faucet, and actually yelps. For real, yelps. Ren watches as the immediate startle reflex passes and a tide of _seriously ticked off_ rises in Hux’s face. 

“What the fuck are you doing in here?” Hux demands, and then winces, and reaches up to turn off the headphones and hook them around his neck. “Jesus, Ren, are you _trying_ to give me a heart attack or something?”

“You --” Ren begins, and then realizes, horribly, that he doesn’t actually have an answer. Or not one he wants Hux to know about, anyway: _you weren’t responding when I tried to annoy you into coming out of here_ doesn’t sound so great, and _something might have happened, the chemicals might have, like, done stuff to you_ is even worse. He runs both hands through his hair, swearing when a few strands catch in his rings. “Forget it,” he says, lamely, after too long. “Just, um. It’s getting late?”

It is, in fact, getting on for the time when they normally pack up and leave. Hux is still staring at him, and Ren finds himself rubbing at his arms as if he’s chilly, and makes himself stop. “That’s all. I didn’t know if, uh, you might have lost track of time or something.”

Hux tilts his head, listening for a moment. “You turned it off,” he says. “The music.”

“I wasn’t feeling it,” he says. 

“Did hell freeze over after all?” Hux turns off the faucet and hangs up the picture he’s been rinsing: a shot of the pond, in the early slant-light, with a few leaves of the trees on the far side picked out brightly. 

Ren blinks at it, ignoring the question. It’s hard to see in this weird edgeless red light, but the way the picture is put together appeals to him. The bright glitter of light on the leaves, the velvety darkness behind them, the faint smudgy light-haze of mist rising off the water, the strong diagonal band of brightness where the sunlight passes through the diffuse moisture in the air...

“--Earth to Ren,” Hux is saying. “Snap out of it.” 

He shakes his head, glad of the familiar dark of the hair over his eyes rather than this unknown red darkness all around them. “This is what you do?”

“Sometimes. It’s not right,” Hux says, nodding at the picture. “It’s close, but it’s not right yet. Come on, if you’re in such a hurry to get out of here.” He has taken off the apron ( _Hux in an apron, like a waiter or something, what the fuck_ , Ren thinks, _that had been seriously weird on its own_ ) and now hangs it up neatly beside several others in a corner. 

The revolving door prompts another brief choking wave of claustrophobia, but then they’re out again into the blessedly cool clear air of the shop -- and the brilliant light, much too bright, what the fuck, Ren can totally understand Hux’s squinty vampire-wince thing. Ow. 

He says nothing as he collects his stuff -- a completely wasted afternoon, he’s gotten fucking _nowhere_ on any of his projects, ugh -- or as he follows Hux down to the car, hands jammed in his pockets, head down, shoulders hunched against the cold.

~

The thing about noise-canceling headphones that _work_ is that they prevent you from hearing useful noise as well as obnoxious noise, and Hux had had absolutely no idea that he wasn’t alone in the darkroom until Ren tapped him on the shoulder. 

He could have done without that, on the whole. Sour adrenaline is still sloshing around in his system as they lock up the shop and head out. After the immediate fight-or-flight response he’d been angry with Ren, bright hot anger that felt much nicer than the intense fear, but -- Ren had looked _weird_ , in the safelight, _uncertain_ , which wasn’t at all like him. Almost worried. 

Which made pretty much no sense. Nor did the way he seemed to space out when he looked at Hux’s latest attempt at the morning light on the pond: Hux had had to say his name several times before he blinked and stopped staring at the picture. In fact he had been acting kind of weird at lunch, too, hadn’t he? And he hadn’t said a fucking word on the way out here. 

Hux unlocks the SLK, which Ren has not yet made good on his threat to name, and as they get in he looks critically at Ren in his layers of hoodie and stupid chain-festooned pants: does this kid not actually own a proper winter coat, or is sheer contrariness coupled with Hot Topic merchandise sufficient to keep him warm? Hux’s own coat is one of his favorite possessions, heavy and stiff and warm and somehow reassuring. He’d wear it all day if possible.

Ren still hasn’t said a damn thing. Hux sighs, putting the car in gear, and looks over at him. “Are you okay?” he asks.

Ren blinks at him, as if Hux has perhaps spoken Urdu. “Huh?” he asks. 

“Are you,” Hux repeats, patiently, “okay?” He pauses at the end of the school’s driveway, signaling before he makes the turn despite the fact that nobody is there to see him. 

“Me?”

“What the fuck, Ren?” Hux demands. “What is _with_ you today? Yes, you, are _you_ okay, although obviously by now the answer to that question is self-evident.”

“I’m fine,” says Ren, still sounding puzzled. “Why?”

“You’re acting weird. And for your information I own a watch and am perfectly capable of telling what time it is, I don’t need you creeping up behind me in the darkroom to be like ‘hey we should pack up now’. If you wanted to see my stuff I’d have shown you, you don’t have to, like...sneak in.”

“I do,” says Ren, and then ducks his head so the hair swings forward. “Want to see. I mean. I am not acting weird, what the fuck are you talking about?”

Hux looks over at him -- full-on Cousin It, only the tip of his nose visible -- and then back at the road: this bit is wiggly, and he has to do some actual driving. “What’s _wrong?_ ” he asks. 

Ren is fiddling with his rings. “The, uh. The chemicals. The photo chemical shit.”

“What about it?”

“Is that dangerous?”

“Not if you’re sensible,” Hux says. “Why?”

“Just wondering.”

“You need good ventilation,” Hux tells him, “which is why the fans are going whenever anybody’s in there, and you don’t want to get any of the stuff in your eyes or mouth, but it’s not like we’re screwing around with nitric acid or anything.”

Ren is silent for a few moments, then: “Listen,” he says, sounding urgent, although he is still hidden almost entirely behind the hair. “You shouldn’t...wear the headphones. To work in there. Like, what if there was a fire drill, you wouldn’t even know. It’s dumb.”

“As I recall,” says Hux, “you were the one who recommended I buy them in the first place, since you can’t be bothered to turn your fucking music down.”

“So maybe I can turn it down a little.” Ren looks at him, now, and Hux can _feel_ the weight of his gaze despite the hair. “I mean, I guess that’s possible. A little bit. I had it up pretty loud and you didn’t -- I mean -- you didn’t come out, I just…”

Something clicks in Hux’s mind, but it makes absolutely zero sense, so he dismisses it at once: there is no way that Kylo Ren could actually have been worried about him. The sure and certain knowledge that Ren has been playing his music extra loud in an attempt to annoy Hux out of the darkroom does not surprise him, however: Ren a) is a jackass and b) wants attention like plants want sunlight. 

Hux rolls his eyes. “I’ll quit wearing them when I quit needing to wear them, which is up to you and your noisy German pals. Happy now?”

“Mmh,” says Ren, which isn’t a _no_ , and slouches back in the seat with his hair over his face. 

The rest of the ride to his house is spent in silence, but when they arrive and Ren gets out of the car he pauses, leaning in through the open door, looking at Hux with almost all of his face visible. “That’s a really good picture,” he says. 

“What is?”

“The one of the pond. With the -- the light on it. It’s really good.”

Hux blinks at him, feeling his face go hot. “...Oh,” he says. “Um. Thanks.”

Ren straightens up and slams the SLK’s door harder than he needs to, and shuffles off up the path to his front door much faster than usual; and Hux is slow to drive away.

~


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> illustration by [kromitar](http://kromitar.tumblr.com/) :D

IV

_I wait alone_  
_For what will never come_  
_And I'll throw it all away_

\--Hole

“So he actually went in there to find you?” Phasma says. They have managed to score one of the upper-school classrooms for lunch this time, and are sitting by the window with the lights off, listening to cold rain batter the windows and gurgle in the overflow drainpipes hung just below the ceiling. 

“Yeah, and apparently crept right up behind me while I was listening to my own music, and tapped me on the shoulder. I fucking _jumped_. Those headphones actually work like they say, I didn’t hear a thing.”

“That’s cute,” she says. Hux is lying on his back on one of the tables, peeling a piece of string cheese, but he leans up on one elbow to glower at her. 

“What do you mean _cute_ , it’s fucking infuriating,” he says. “Now I’m constantly going to be wondering if he’s creeping around behind my back waiting to startle me again. Also did you not get the part where he’s apparently been blasting his stupid music in an effort to annoy me badly enough that I quit what I’m doing and come out to, what, yell at him?”

“That’s even cuter.” Phasma is sitting neatly crosslegged on the table opposite his. “I want to meet this kid.”

“Ugh, no you don’t,” Hux says, settling back and regarding the ceiling. “Also I think he must have, like, sonar or something. Like bats. Because he goes around with his hair over his face _all the time_ and I could swear he can’t see a fucking thing but he never walks into walls, or bumps into anybody, or falls down the stairs.” He peels a long strand off his string cheese and chews it meditatively. “Maybe he uses the sheer force of his terrible personality to sense obstacles, like an electric eel uses electrical fields. I would not be surprised.”

Phasma doesn’t reply, and he rolls on his side again to look at her. “What?”

“Nothing,” she says. “So did you get that shot you were working on? I know the weather’s been shit for a couple days but you said you thought there was hope.”

“Oh,” Hux says, and sits up, sliding off the edge of the table, collecting his trash with the absentminded neatness of long habit. He throws away the wrappers before extracting a half-inch binder from his bookbag. “It’s not right yet, but I’m pretty sure it’s not gonna _be_ right, at this rate. This is as close as I’ve got.”

She takes the binder and opens it: inside are clear plastic protective sleeves holding a series of landscape-oriented prints. There are three different shots and at least two prints of each with different exposures and some dodge work, and she says nothing as she flips carefully through them, tilting the prints to the grey light from the windows. After a few minutes she turns back through them and taps her finger lightly on the edge of one print. “This one,” she says. “I like this one best.”

Hux has been nervously fidgeting a few steps away, but he comes closer to see which print she’s chosen, and some of the anxiety drains out of him. “Okay, good. Me too. That’s...the contrast is closest to where I want it to be, the light and shadow balanced.”

He does not mention that this is also the version Kylo Ren had stared at in the darkroom with a weird expression on his face: that is coincidental. (Of course, it made some sense that the kid was at least vaguely capable of aesthetic appreciation, he made shit like that ring, like the locket with the little scatter of violet-blue stones, but still. It had been weird, to have his picture looked at, like that, through that hair.)

(Hux is convinced of the sonar explanation.)

“What’s this for, anyway?” Phasma asks, handing back the binder. Hux closes it, holds it to his chest. 

“Midterm. Well, the independent-study version of a midterm, I guess. It’s due right before break.”

“Shit, that’s like...three weeks away,” she says. “You’re finished already?”

“It’s not finished,” he says. “And I wanted the time to do another project as a backup if this one ended up sucking completely. I think I’ll do some _interior_ shot this time, I am done with creeping around in the cold wet grass way too early in the morning. Something nice and _poseable_.”

Phasma laughs. “Go take pictures of the theater nerds, they’ll never quit posing for you.”

“Yeah, but I have a real low tolerance for theatrics,” says Hux. “On or off the stage.”

~

Which is why, three hours later, he does not join the little group of students standing around the door to the heavy-metal shop and watching Ren do his thing with the big torch. Apparently he is done with _Balance_ , because now he isn’t using the torch to cut up or stick together bits of metal, he’s melting something in a crucible. 

The bell rings, and most of the onlookers split the scene, but a few stragglers remain. Ren is not allowed to use the oxyacetylene rig without Mr. Tekka’s supervision, so he has to be content with using class time and lunch periods to get his heavy projects done, except on those rare occasions when the shop teacher stays late. Today is not one of those days, and Hux hears the roar of the torch cut off as he heads for the darkroom. There is a completely different shot of reflections in the rippled pond surface from the same roll as his latest attempts that he thinks might be interesting to play with in terms of contrast and detail.

This time he doesn’t have the cans on, so he can hear quite clearly when the rest of the kids are herded out, leaving Ren alone in the shop. Hux is expecting a torrent of thumping bass and growling German at any moment, but oddly enough it’s dead silent. 

Really silent. He can’t hear Ren cursing, or the faint roar-hiss of the jewelry torch, or the rumble of the buffing wheel. 

Despite himself Hux finds it ridiculously difficult to concentrate without the constant background noise he’s grown so accustomed to over the past several weeks. Maybe Ren isn’t even _there_ , maybe he’d left with the others.

_Whatever_ , he tells himself, and gets back to work.

And finds himself staring vaguely at the projected negative on the enlarger’s easel without actually seeing it, tapping his fingers on the counter. There are a lot of...dangerous things in the shop. When you stop to think about it, there are a _lot_ of ways a kid could damage themselves, without trying very hard at all. 

If Ren had somehow fucked himself up, Hux thinks, he would have heard a lot of yelling and cursing. He’s probably just not there at all. Probably got another ride home.

Two minutes later, he switches off the enlarger lamp and stalks out of the darkroom, muttering _goddamn inconsiderate asshole couldn’t just tell me he was getting a ride home early, why do I even put up with this_ , not sure what to expect, not sure what he actually wants to see. It certainly isn’t Kylo Ren sitting quietly on one of the stools at the shop counter, bent intently over something, paying zero attention to Hux. 

He frowns, and comes over, and only notices the white cords trailing from under the hair when he is almost beside Ren. Now he _can_ hear something, the faint twittering of music turned quite a long way up on someone else’s earbuds. 

Hux stares at him, and tilts his head to one side, still staring, and the little movement must have triggered Ren’s sonar or something because Ren glances up at him, looking surprised. And sits up, taking the earbuds out. 

“What?” he asks.

Hux realizes he has no idea what to say. “It was too quiet,” he finally manages, lamely. “I wondered if you’d, I dunno, left early. Or something.”

“Nah,” Ren says. “I figured if I just wear these I can turn my shit up as loud as I want and _you_ can’t be a prissy little twerp about it. Well, actually, no, you _can_. I just don’t have to pay attention.”

“Classy.” Hux rolls his eyes. “Okay. Have fun fucking up your hearing, I appreciate the consideration of not having to have mine fucked up as well. I’m going back to work.”

“Who’s stopping you?”

Hux glares at him, turns on his heel, and stalks back to the darkroom. This time he has no difficulty getting started.

An hour and a half later he’s rinsing fixer off a series of prints showing the light and dark ripples of reflection in water, each one exposed for a different length of time. It’s a little bit of a surprise to Hux when he notices that the picture looks much more interesting upside down: it’s not obviously inverted, but the lines that register to the mind as _spreading ripples seen from above_ lose all their context and exist merely as shape and form, abstracted from the duty of representation. 

He covers the sides of one print, cropping out all but the center, and that’s even better, that’s...that would look good blown up _huge_ , several feet on a side. 

Hux hangs up the prints to dry and starts setting up the enlarger to blow the projected negative image up to the right dimensions for his new idea, and he is _excited_ about it the way he hasn’t been about his morning-light picture for, like, _days_ now, and that is when somebody knocks on the hollow cylinder of the revolving door and calls “Huxley?”

_Ugh_. “What?” he calls back, and “Don’t call me Huxley, you twit.”

“Can I come in?”

He blinks, in the red darkness. “Did you just ask _nicely_?”

“No, I said _can_ ,” Ren tells him, muffled through the door. “Nicely would have been _may_.” Not that he’s actually waiting for permission: the door turns, and Ren emerges into the darkroom, looking weirdly uncomfortable. Hux wonders if it freaks him out, the door. It’s a comfort to him now, but it had kind of been tough to get used to at first.

“What do you want?” Hux inquires.

Ren is doing that hard-blinking thing you do when you’re trying to get your vision adjusted. He is also fiddling with his rings. At this point Hux realizes that he has the hair tucked behind his ears, in almost fully stowed position: only one lock is falling over his face. It is a face that currently looks...disgruntled. Cross, and unhappy, and awkward all at once. 

“I can’t get shit to work,” Ren says, staring around, not looking at him. “Everything I do just sucks and I can’t afford to waste any more stock, I maxed out my allowance already, and…”

Hux watches him for a moment longer. He’s not sure exactly what prompts him to say, in a rather kinder voice than he had actually intended, “Want to see how this works?”

“Yes,” says Ren, immediately, too fast, and shuffles over to stand beside him. “I mean, yeah, sure, I guess. Beats sitting around doing nothing.”

Hux rolls his eyes. “Don’t do _me_ any favors. You ever seen one of these before?” He taps his fingers on the enlarger’s easel. 

“I’m guessing it’s not a microscope, so no. Do I have to wear an apron too, for maximum dorkage, or is that not, like, mandatory?”

“I think you can get away with not wearing one, unless you want to come help with the developing. Shut up and listen: if you’re going to be in here, either sit down quietly and keep out of the way or do what I tell you.”

“Damn, Huxley,” Ren says, but there’s a smile in his voice. “Listen to the fucking General here.”

Hux stiffens for a moment, but lets it go. “As I was saying. This is an enlarger, and it projects light through the negative which is held in this film carrier here, through this lens, onto the baseboard and easel below. You raise and lower the enlarger head to change the size of the projected image, and focus with the lens. With me so far?”

Ren nods, and Hux can’t see any confusion in his face, just what looks like actual interest -- and that feels oddly, absurdly _pleasant_. He begins to talk again, explaining how the photosensitive coating on the paper works, how the developer and stop bath and fixer in their turn render visible and permanent the image the enlarger has just projected onto the paper, how the light parts of the negative let the most light through to the paper and therefore result in the darkest areas on the developed image. As he talks, he works. 

It is decidedly weird having Kylo Ren standing right behind him as he processes the print he’s just exposed, tilting the baths back and forth every now and then. Hux has a very strong _awareness_ of Ren, of his physical presence, the way he takes up space, the way he could very easily rest his chin on Hux’s shoulder, if he wanted, because he is annoyingly tall as well as just plain annoying. Hux is a little glad when he can take the print out of the fixer and move over to the sink to rinse it off; Ren stays where he is. The shoulder he had been looking over feels strangely chilly without him there. 

“And that,” Hux says, hanging up his abstract ripples to dry, “is how we do that. It’s also time to pack up and get out of here. I hope you appreciated the individual lecture and demonstration. There will not actually be a quiz.”

“Mm,” says Ren, face unreadable in the red light, and doesn’t elaborate. Hux tidies up quickly, hangs up his apron, collects his dried prints from the previous session, fetches his bookbag, and gestures for Ren to precede him through the door -- all in silence. 

He can’t stand it anymore by the time they get out to the car. “-- Look, are you okay? Do you feel sick, or something? The chemicals bother some people more than others.”

“What?” Ren is obviously miles away.

“You’ve gone all completely silent, which is -- like, _not you_ ,” Hux says, looking over at him, keys in the ignition, ignoring the fact that he’d had to ask a quiet Ren if he was okay just a day earlier. “I just want to know if you’re likely to puke all over my upholstery or what.”

“I’m not gonna puke,” Ren says, affronted. “Can’t a guy just _think_ for a while without you jumping to conclusions?”

“Oh, you’re _thinking?_ Okay. I had no idea what that actually looked like. The More You Know.” Hux lights the engine, wondering if you can actually sprain your eyeballs by rolling them. Ren’s been acting weirder than usual lately and his are getting a hell of a workout.

“Fuck you,” Ren says, something close to amiably, and Hux _sighs_ and puts the car in gear.

~

~

It has not been a good afternoon for Kylo Ren, what with one thing and another. The cafeteria had been out of Snickers ice-cream bars, and he had had to eat fries instead, and he _really_ fucking wants some sugar but has no change left over for the vending machines. And he’d gotten a C on an English paper, which -- okay, he’d been bored to tears reading the stupid book _and_ writing the paper on it but still, fuck getting Cs.

And then he’d just gotten all set up to try cuttlebone casting for the first time and the goddamn bell had rung just as he started heating the crucible, and Mr. Tekka had been like “nope, pack it in, you can do that tomorrow” and there is nothing that pisses Ren off more than _not being able to do a thing_ when he’s all prepared and ready and _wanting_ to do it. Well, okay. Some other things piss Ren off more than that. But not _many_. 

Also, he kind of has a headache. Which has nothing to do with how far he’s turned up the volume on his ipod. 

After everyone else had gone he’d tried to get some work done on the poison ring, but he kept fucking up the hinge -- twice in a row he’d managed to get one of the barrels soldered and the other one loose, and when he tried to get the second joint to flow the first one melted into a lump of unrecognizable silver and it just. Really _sucked._ A lot. He couldn’t even yell and jump up and down and throw things because this was all kind of really delicate and...also he didn’t particularly want Hux to hear that. 

(It had been weird looking up from the counter to see Hux standing there, staring at him with his head tilted. He’d taken the earbuds out, and Hux had said something about it being _too quiet_ \-- for fuck’s sake could he make up his mind already, what the hell -- and then disappeared again.)

He doesn’t really know what had made him go over to knock on the darkroom door after some more useless attempts to draw a decent design for this stupid ring project: maybe just general dissatisfaction with the universe made the prospect of annoying Hux seem extra-appealing. It takes some effort to crack the cold condescending expression, but Ren likes a challenge, and Hux looks kind of hilarious when he’s mad: he goes this shade of pink that clashes horribly with the hair. 

In the red light of the darkroom, though, he looks...otherworldly. It does funny things to skin, that light. You can’t seem to see edges very clearly, and little variations in skin tone vanish, leaving a kind of...slightly-translucent hard smoothness. Like -- Ren has to reach for it, but he finds the comparison after a few moments: it’s like alabaster. 

Hux’s hair isn’t orange, in the red light: it looks barely darker than his skin. He has his sleeves rolled up, and the little hairs on his forearms glitter as he works. Ren watches as he sets up the enlarger, the negative image projected through a red filter for now: he raises the head until the image of light and dark ripply lines is blown up to the size he wants it, adjusts the focus. It’s weirdly enjoyable, watching him work. Ren is reminded of those narrow fingers on the wheel and shift knob of his car, just as deft and sure as they are now. 

It’s also kind of more awesome than Ren wants to admit even to himself that Hux is actually explaining what he’s _doing_ and why -- and he’s not dumbing it down, or not noticeably. In Ren’s experience, people explaining things almost always seem to assume that their audience is kind of stupid, but Hux is just telling him stuff like he has no doubt of Ren’s ability to keep up. 

Also, this is cool. It’s straight-up cool. The way the light coming from the enlarger through the negative fucks with the silver salts in the paper’s coating, and then the developer converts the fucked-up silver halide particles into actual silver metal -- like, the black parts of the picture are _metal_ \-- and then the stop bath puts the brakes on that reaction, and then the rest of the silver halide that hasn’t been affected by the light gets dissolved and washed off in the fixer. Ren’s headache hasn’t gone away, is in fact kind of getting worse, but he ignores it: this is worth paying attention to.

He isn’t sure when he had moved from a few steps away to standing right behind Hux, looking over his shoulder at the picture appearing in the developer bath. He’s...feeling weirdly aware of Hux as an actual person, a real human being, rather than a collection of irritating mannerisms in a sweater-vest: for some reason he seems more _solid_ than before. This close Ren can just about smell whatever he puts on his hair, over the more noticeable chemical odors: it’s not something Ren recognizes, faintly sweet and sharp. 

When Hux moves away Ren stays where he is, feeling decidedly weird. He watches as the print gets washed and hung up to dry. “And that,” Hux says briskly, “is how we do that.”

He’d be a good teacher, Ren thinks, actually. He already dresses like one, all he needs is the stupid blazer with the patches on the elbows and maybe a bow tie. Professor Hux. 

He could snap out orders, too, which was kind of funny. There had been that one weird moment when Ren had said something like _yessir, General_ and Hux had...changed, for a moment, stiffening as if something had just pulled all of his strings, like _that wasn’t okay_ , like that had touched a nerve, and Ren is super curious about why. In fact he’s kind of curious about a lot of stuff and that, in itself, is a weird feeling: he doesn’t normally give a shit about _other people_ , or about the reasons they do the things they do. 

They get all the way back to the car and Ren is still thinking about silver halide particles and what light does, and what red light does to skin, and about what the hell motivates somebody to be that uptight and intense and _totally unchill_ and basically cosplay a 50-year-old the whole time, and Hux is talking. 

“--do you feel sick or something? The chemicals bother some people more than others.”

“What?” Ren has no idea what he’s talking about. 

Hux demands to know if he’s going to throw up, which, what the hell, of course he’s not -- although his head is still hurting and he thinks maybe the chemicals _did_ do something to him, his throat kind of feels weird. Not that Hux needs to know that.

“Can’t a guy just think for a while without you jumping to conclusions?” he says.

“Oh, you’re _thinking?_ Okay. I had no idea what that actually looked like. The More You Know.” Hux rolls his eyes. He does that a lot, Ren has noticed. 

“Fuck you,” Ren says, and without meaning to he uses the same mild, casual tone of voice Hux had used the other day in the lunchroom -- and notices this, too, and notices himself noticing, which is kind of embarrassing. 

He closes his eyes and leans back in the seat and says nothing at all, and Hux pilots the two of them through the dark.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> illustrations by [kromitar](http://kromitar.tumblr.com/)!

_Oh the boys on the radio_  
_They crash and burn_  
_They fold and fade so slow_

\-- Hole

The next day Ren is more uncommunicative and snappish than ever, responding to Hux with monosyllabic grunts from behind the hair except for when he actually has to speak in sentences, when he manages to sound as if he is only with difficulty repressing an urge to blow up the planet and everybody on it. 

He’s not at lunch, and that afternoon when Hux arrives to begin work, he’s not in the shop either; but after a while Hux can hear the buffing wheel going, and clattering and clanking of tools. By the time Hux packs up and prepares to leave, Ren has stopped doing whatever it is he’s been doing, and Hux squints through the sudden brightness of the shop to see him...sitting at the counter with his head pillowed in his folded arms, like he’s napping or something. That really isn’t like Ren, but when he comes over to have a closer look Ren straightens up and glares at him. Hux tries not to notice that the marks of his sleeve’s wrinkles are printed on forehead and cheek, just visible before he shakes the hair forward into its fully deployed position. 

“Are you okay?” Hux asks, peering at him.

Ren’s glare intensifies, to the point where Hux can almost feel it as a physical force. “How about you _mind your own fucking business_ , you officious sack of shit,” he snarls, “or isn’t that something _rich kids_ ever get taught how to do?”

Hux doesn’t think he’s ever heard Ren say _rich kids_ with quite that particular level of vicious dislike, till now. 

The drive to Ren’s house is not a pleasant experience. Ren retreats into the concealment of his hoodie and does not speak but radiates almost palpable waves of Shitty Mood the whole entire time.

Hux has no idea _why_ he’s in such an extraordinarily bad humor -- bad even for Ren -- and is absolutely not about to ask him, either. He pulls away as soon as Ren has slammed the SLK’s door behind him, and that night he is particularly glad that his father has a lot of work to do before his latest business trip and does not wish to be disturbed. That night, eating his microwaved Lean Cuisine alone in the cavernous kitchen, Hux does not feel up to the challenge of talking to _anybody_ , let alone Brendol Hux and his cross-examining conversational style.

~

In the morning it is neither raining nor snowing, but engaged in that particularly unpleasant type of precipitation the Weather Channel calls _wintry mix_. Hux always thinks this sounds much too appealing, like some kind of assorted holiday candy, rather than “miserable slippery freezing bullshit.”

He watches his father’s Porsche disappear down the driveway: it’s still dark out, six in the morning and his flight is at eight, and this time he’ll be gone for two whole _weeks_. Hux had been concerned that the flight would be delayed, or canceled, because of the weather, but apparently _thank God, thank God_ it's not bad enough to fuck up flight schedules.

The dwindling taillights are a beautiful, beautiful sight. When they’re gone completely it feels as if some very heavy and unpleasant weight, like a backpack full of worms, is lifted from Hux’s shoulders. He takes a deep breath, feeling his ribcage expand, and sighs it out again. Two weeks of freedom is like a goddamn holiday break. 

He goes upstairs, gnawing on a bagel, and gets ready for school -- and it isn’t until he’s actually in the car, headed for Kylo Ren’s house, that he remembers what a complete asshole Ren had been the previous afternoon. Like, sure, his base state of being was pretty much “asshole,” but yesterday had been an exacerbation; yesterday he might even have broken his own record for Most Obnoxious in Fewest Words. Rather more of Hux’s good mood than he wants to admit vanishes, thinking about Ren, and a slightly different _type_ of weight settles around him.

Matters are not improved when he pulls up to Ren’s house and sees that Ren hasn’t bothered with an umbrella, standing in the rain and sleet as if he’s not aware that it is happening, because this means that Hux’s upholstery is about to get wet. _What the fuck,_ Hux thinks. _What kind of idiot stands around in this weather if he has the option to stay inside and watch through the goddamn window for his ride to arrive?_

Ren shuffles over, slower than ever, and Hux is drumming his fingers impatiently on the wheel as he gets in -- and yeah, there we go, fucking wintry mix all over his passenger seat. _Thanks, Ren_ , he thinks. _Thanks a whole assload._

He’s more bundled up than Hux has ever seen him -- it looks like he has two, or possibly three hoodies on, they’re so baggy and interchangeably black that it’s hard to tell -- and practically nothing of his face is visible at all. “Do you not _have_ a coat?” Hux snaps, without actually meaning to. 

Ren just shrugs and makes a truculent but uncommunicative sort of noise, and Hux shoves the car into gear with more force than is warranted and actually spins his wheels for a brief moment, before the tires catch against the slippery road and they’re moving. He drives in silence for a couple of miles before Ren startles him with a sudden and violent series of sneezes. 

Oh. 

Oh, _shit_. Hux looks over at him again, paying more attention this time, and registers that he appears to be shivering despite the layers he has on. He sniffs, one of those long drawn-out snurfles that grate particularly on the nerves, and Hux leans back to grab the box of tissues behind the passenger seat and drops it on his lap. “Why didn’t you _say_ ,” he asks. 

“Say what?” Ren’s voice is raspy and congested. He gives another long infuriating sniffle, ignoring the tissues. 

“Oh, I don’t know, how about calling me and saying ‘hey, Hux, I’m out sick today, don’t bother coming to pick me up’,” Hux suggests. “Why are you even going to school?”

“I have shit due.” 

“Your mom actually let you go to school like this?”

“Fuck you, Hux,” Ren says, and would evidently have said more, but loses it in a nasty fit of coughing. Hux looks over at him. The visible bits of his face are paler than usual, his eyes screwed up, but the violet-brown smudges underneath them are still stark against the pallor. When he stops coughing he just leans his head against the window, as if the conversation has been satisfactorily concluded, which it has not. 

“Seriously,” Hux says. “Does your mom _know_ you’re sick or what?”

“No.”

Okay, good, that’s...at least Mrs. Whatever His Real Last Name Is isn’t a fucking sociopath, but how could she not notice this? Either Ren is reading his mind or the question is just so obvious he doesn’t need to: “She had to leave early this morning, before I got up.”

_Morning_ comes out like _mordig_. “And you didn’t call her and tell her?”

“No.” 

Hux is about to ask what the fuck he was thinking, when an unwelcome thought rises in his mind: would he, under similar circumstances, contact his father? 

_That’s different_ , Hux thinks. _Ren has normal-people parents. It’s...just different. Okay?_

Great, now he’s talking to himself inside his own head. Kylo Ren is doing pretty well on his evident quest to drive Hux batshit insane by the end of the semester. 

They are only a few miles away from school, on a clear stretch of road with nobody coming, when Ren sneezes again and immediately proceeds to embark on another coughing fit; and Hux looks in his mirrors, and makes a decision. 

Ignoring Ren, he stamps on the clutch and palms the wheel hard left, all the way to lock, as he pulls on the handbrake lever. The SLK slews sharply, pushing them sideways in their seats; Hux spins the wheel back to straight, releases the handbrake, downshifts, and lets in the clutch. In the space of a few seconds they have completed a 180-degree turn and are heading back the way they had come at a staid three miles over the posted limit. 

Ren has stopped coughing, and is cursing instead. He pulls back the layers of hoods, damp hair drawn back with them, and stares at Hux with shadow-ringed eyes: he hasn’t put the liner on today, but then again he doesn’t really need it. “What the _fuck_ are you doing?” he demands to know. “What _was_ that?”

“Taking you home,” Hux says. “If not for your sake, for everyone else in the goddamn school, Typhoid Mary. And there weren’t any places to turn around.”

“What the fuck,” Ren says again, but with less force. “You can’t just...kidnap me to my own house.”

“Watch me. What do you even have to turn in that’s so fucking important, anyhow?”

Ren slumps back in the seat, sniffling, and mutters “Extra credit for English.” 

_Jesus Christ there is a box of tissues on your actual lap_ , Hux thinks crossly. “Extra credit,” he repeats.

“The teacher said I could maybe up my grade on a paper.” Now he doesn’t sound truculent at all, just...tired, and unhappy, and Hux’s chest hurts for some reason. “Fucking...forget it, it’s not like I could have actually fixed the grade, anyway, this extra-credit report is shit just like the paper was shit, handing it in is a waste of time.”

“Jesus, Ren,” Hux says. “Did it ever occur to you that I can actually drive your assignment to school without you being present to accompany it? Give it to me when we get you back home and I’ll hand it in for you.”

Ren looks over at him through the hair. “You would?”

His knuckles on the wheel go subtly whiter. “Goddamnit,” he says. “ _Yes_ , you idiot. Yes I would.” How the hell had that option not occurred to Ren?

_Maybe_ , says the little voice in the back of his mind, _maybe he hasn’t had anyone he could ask, before._

That is enough to make Hux stop and think. _Remember what it was like in the other schools? Before you came here, before there was Phasma?_

He says nothing, but a lot of the incredulity and anger drains out of him, leaving a sort of dull sick unhappiness behind. 

When they get back, Hux pulls up in front of the house the way he always does to drop Ren off, but this time he pulls the much-abused handbrake on and kills the engine. Ren blinks at him, and is still blinking when Hux gets out and comes around to the passenger side to open his door. “Come on,” he says. “Out. Can you call your dad, if your mom’s busy?”

Ren hangs on to the SLK’s roof to lever himself out, and straightens up with no grace at all, tall and gangling and miserable. “No,” he says. “He’s in...fuck. Kuala Lumpur?”

“He’s what?” Hux falls in beside him as Ren shuffles up the walk: this is what he has watched many times, from the viewpoint of the driver’s seat. 

“Or somewhere like that. I forget. He’s a pilot,” Ren says. “For Fedex. He’s, like, never home.”

“You’re lucky,” Hux says, without meaning to, and could kick himself. Ren looks at him blearily, and is obviously about to ask something when he sneezes instead. It’s enough of a distraction: afterward he just fishes out his keys, which have what looks like a little very detailed silver skull dangling from the ring along with the other shit. 

Hux only gets a glimpse of it before the door opens and an enormous hairy set of paws descends upon Ren’s shoulders -- like, _huge_ paws -- and Ren’s visible face is being washed by a very large pink tongue belonging to what Hux now recognizes as something akin to an Irish wolfhound, one of those huge tall dogs covered in hair. He is a little impressed that Ren’s unrelieved black is not constantly covered in brown dog hair, and wonders if he keeps a lint roller in one of the pockets of the stupid pants. 

“Chewie,” Ren is saying, trying to fend off the tongue and its owner, who is making delighted groaning noises. “Fuck off, c’mon, down. Get down. Sit.”

This only sort of works, inasmuch as the dog -- Chewie? Seriously? -- turns his attention from Ren to Hux, and this is not so much a happy greeting as a _who the fuck are you_ kind of attention. Hux stays still while he is sniffed, wondering how this is happening to him, how this is actually his life, right now, at this exact moment. 

“-- He’s okay, Chewie,” Ren says, sounding very tired. “It’s fine. He’s allowed.”

Hux blinks, a little surprised to hear it. Presumably Chewie is too, because he goes on sniffing intently for a few more moments -- and then, when Hux cautiously extends a hand, apparently decides he’s not worth disemboweling, and merely loops that enormous tongue all the way around his wrist for a moment. And then, duty done, turns and trots off, his claws clicking on the floor. 

“Um,” says Ren. 

Hux looks at him, lost for words. 

“Sorry. I...he’s friendly, he just...I should have warned you. Uh. You’re...okay with dogs, I guess?”

Hux is suddenly, appallingly, trying not to laugh. Today is ridiculous. Everything about today is ridiculous. “Yes,” he says, “I’m fine with dogs. Now go lie down.”

Something indefinable crosses Ren’s face, but he makes no move. Hux runs his hands through his hair, recalling too late that one of them is now inescapably doggy, goddamnit, and sighs sharply through his nose. “Do I have to do _everything_ ,” he asks, rhetorically, and looks around. There’s a small but warm and obviously _used_ kitchen to his left, and beyond that a staircase leading up, and then the passageway opens out into a living room with a big TV and the kind of couch you do not see in glossy interior-design magazines: it looks actually comfortable. 

Hux pauses a moment longer, and then with the air of somebody who has made a decision stalks over to Ren and points. “Go,” he repeats, “and lie down,” and this time Ren does start shuffling couchwards.

A little while later, he is reasonably content that Ren is at least warm and wearing dry clothes, with cold meds and lots of water close at hand, and that he is going to stay put for a while because the dog Chewbacca (where the _fuck_ do they come up with this shit, he wonders) has helpfully gone to sleep on top of him. Hux had called Ren in to the school office and then stood by, arms folded, while Ren left a message on his mom’s voicemail telling her he was staying home sick, and had painstakingly put his own number into Ren’s phone, _not thinking at all_ about the fact that he was _giving somebody his number_ , and told him to call if he actually for-real needed something. 

(Of course Ren’s phone was a Razr. With a fucking dragon on it. An actual dragon, in dark grey and silver. Hux’s...is also a Razr, but the regular _normal person_ model.)

“I can’t reach the remote,” Ren had said, looking up at him hazily, and Hux had gathered up all of the remotes, in a bouquet, and deposited them on the floor beside the couch. 

“Yes you can. Where’s this thing you want to hand in to the English teacher?”

“In my bag. Blue folder.” 

He had sounded sleepy already; and by the time Hux leaves he is fairly confident that Ren is squared away. 

At school he checks in with the office to collect his first-ever tardy pass -- it’s getting on for ten in the damn morning -- and hands Ren’s assignment in on his way to history class. And...spends the rest of the day half-hoping, half-dreading that his phone will start to ring. 

~

~

 

Ren is playing with his dragon phone, turning it over in his hands, somewhat slowly and groggily. He keeps meaning to fill in all the little etched scales with different colors of nail polish (he has some, other than black, but they’re _almost_ black), and keeps not getting around to it. 

The phone had been a birthday present from his flaky uncle, who half the time seems to get Ren and half the time is even denser than his parents, which is saying a lot. This time he’d been pretty much right on the money, and the thank-you note Ren’s mom made him write was genuine. 

(A long time ago, when he was just a little kid, Ren had stayed with Uncle Luke for a couple of months while his parents house-hunted. It had been...weird, but kind of cool. But mostly weird.)

Ren flips the phone open and shut a couple of times. He’s been dozing for most of the day, with breaks for energetic coughing and sneezing workouts, on the sofa to which Hux had more or less ordered him. It was weird to be ordered around by someone shorter than you, but Hux had apparently been studying with a master, because that _I will be obeyed_ tone just kind of reached past your brain and grabbed you by the spine. 

Ren had spent most of yesterday feeling vaguely shitty and being annoyed about it, and also being annoyed about the fact that the entire world was apparently determined to be as stupid and irritating as possible. As the day wore on, _vaguely_ shitty had turned into _definitely shitty_ , and his temper had frayed almost apart, and Hux had been there with that fucking _concerned_ look on his face that Ren can’t stand, asking stupid questions, and he’d...said some stuff. There was a brief surge of vicious joy at the sight of Hux’s expression changing from _worried_ to _hurt_ \-- Ren is used to the stab of poison-pleasure that comes with that change -- and then it had drained away all at once, leaving him nauseated and miserable on top of the headache. 

He could tell Hux was pissed off, but he had been a lot more concerned with himself, and they hadn’t bothered to say a word to each other all the way to his house. The entire universe, including Hux and his stupid car and his _worried look_ , could go right straight to hell for all Ren was concerned, and he had stomped up to his room and spent the evening trying to write this fucking extra-credit thing for English. 

He had finally gotten to sleep around midnight, bad sleep with confusing dreams in it, and in the morning had woken up with all the symptoms of what promised to be a spectacular cold. Looking out into the icy grey day and forcing himself out of bed and into all the layers he could find _sucked_ : but he had to go to school, he had shit due. 

As it often does, this kind of combination of physical discomfort and negative mental state had kind of doubled down on him, and he’d gone from unhappiness to active self-sabotage, standing in the freezing fucking rain out of _spite_ at the universe, mostly. By the time Hux showed up Ren was shivering badly, and had to admit that the stupid car’s stupid seat heating was actually a kind of useful feature. Hux was giving him the _you’re a fungus_ look again, and Ren was not up for that just at the moment and had hidden behind the hair --

\-- and then he’d started sneezing again, and Hux had _stared_ at him, and they’d argued, not really getting anywhere, and _then_ \--

\-- he still doesn’t know what the fuck that had even been, with the car. For a second he’d thought they were going to crash, like Hux had suddenly come over all suicidal, possibly out of sheer irritation with Ren, but then they’d straightened out and were facing the other way. It was some shit like out of a movie, the way he’d just...spun the wheel one-handed like that and did something with the parking brake and Ren would kind of actually really like to watch Hux do that again, sometime when he didn’t feel quite so fucking horrible. 

Hux had been...brisk, Ren thinks is the word, brisk, but not unsympathetic. Maybe the fungus expression is reserved for when Ren isn’t trying to cough up a lung every fifteen minutes, because it had been notably absent after that initial glare.

They’d gotten back and Hux didn’t just drop him off but walked with him to the house. Chewie had...introduced himself, Ren hadn’t even thought to give Hux a heads-up on the wolfhound situation, but thank fuck he appeared to be cool with it. And then the orders started, and if Ren were being completely honest with himself it had been kind of weirdly _comforting_ , somehow, being told what to do.

It wasn’t long before he was settled on the couch, sans shoes and sodden extra layers of hoodie, covered in a fleece blanket. It was stupidly nice to lie down. He winced as he pictured himself having to actually sit through classes feeling like this, as if something jagged and poisonous had been shoved all the way up each nostril into his sinuses, as if whoever was doing the shoving had also taken the time to sandpaper the inside of his throat. 

He’d have been _disruptive to the classroom environment_ and people would’ve stared at him. It would have...really sucked, and he’d probably have had to go to the nurse, and then they’d have called his mom to come get him and _that_ would also have sucked, he really hated it when she had to stop doing stuff in order to collect him. 

Ren had been feeling extremely sorry for himself by the time Hux reappeared from wherever he’d been -- where _had_ he been? -- and set a tray down on the coffee table. Which he pulled over to within easy reach, and then sat down on the edge of the couch, looking down at Ren. Whatever he saw apparently didn’t please him much. 

“Hey,” he told Ren. “Cheer up. You’ll be back in the shop being a complete and utter dick in a couple of days.”

Ren had wanted to advance the opinion that a) of course he knew that and b) _he_ wasn’t the complete and utter dick, that was Hux, obviously, but he’d just ended up coughing instead. Which didn’t really carry rhetorical weight. Hux had sighed and turned to the tray on the coffee table.

“Pay attention,” he said. The tray held bottles of cold medicine, along with water, cough drops, a box of tissues, and a mug. “You can have this stuff --” Hux had tapped one bottle -- “every four hours, and _this_ one every six. I couldn’t find any other cough drops than the evil blue menthol death flavor, so that’s what you get.”

Ren blinked at him. “Did you just go...searching round my house for stuff?”

That made Hux’s ears go pink, but he just sighed. “I looked in the bathroom medicine cabinets,” he said, “which is where most people keep their medicine, by some remarkable coincidence. And the cough drops were in the kitchen drawer.” 

He had felt _weird_ \-- weird on top of gross was a bad combination -- about _Hux_ , of all people, Hux who probably lived in a mansion and had a staff of maids to keep the place tidy, wandering around unsupervised in Ren’s own small and cluttered house. And being, like…all _domestic_ and shit, taking care of him like he knew what he was doing, like he’d had a lot of practice. Hux, who annoyed the fuck out of Ren, like, all the time. Hux, who was also useful, because of his car. 

His car had saved Ren from the ignominy of having to be collected by his mother. The thought had risen unbidden in his mind, and because he didn’t know what to do with it Ren cast about for a distraction. “ -- What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the mug.

“Tea.” Hux handed it to him, and Ren wrapped his hands around the warmth of the mug, breathing in the steam. 

“I didn’t hear the kettle,” he said, and took a sip, and discovered that Hux had put honey in it, and wasn’t even slightly able to understand why this was important, just that it was.

“I like your microwave.” Hux’s pale pointy face had softened, just for a moment, in a smile. “It’s got character.”

Ren had scowled down at the mug in his hands, not meeting Hux’s eyes. “It’s a museum piece, it’s from, like, 1986. I keep telling them to get a new one but it’s like ‘the old one still works perfectly well, why waste money’.” Abruptly he shut up and addressed himself to the tea, rather than discussing finance with Hux. Of all people. The rich kid.

Hux had called the school office himself on Ren’s behalf, sounding clipped and businesslike, and made Ren leave a message on his mom’s voicemail. And then he’d -- taken the dragon-engraved Razr that Ren is now playing with, and entered his own digits. 

Hux’s ears were pink again by the time he handed back Ren’s phone. He’d been somewhat terse and uncommunicative afterward, and then collected Ren’s English paper and left, and the house had felt _strange_ : strange and empty. 

Ren flips the phone open again, checks the time. 3:30. Hux will be in the shop by now, doing his thing. He’ll be mad if Ren calls and interrupts him. 

On the other hand, he _did_ say to call him if Ren needed anything, and he totally does, he needs cough drops that are literally any other flavor than these: that is a legitimate medical requirement. His mom won’t be home for another two hours. It would be cruel of Hux to let him suffer. 

It’s just a pity Ren can’t be there to watch him go that irritated shade of pink that clashes with his hair, he thinks, scrolling through his contact list: there he is, three uninformative letters. Ren opens the entry and adds three more, so that when he does press SEND the screen informs him that it is calling HUXLEY. 

~

~


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> illustrations by [kromitar](http://kromitar.tumblr.com/)!

_In your endless summer night_  
_I'll be on the other side_

\-- Hole

Ren is out for two days. By the end of that first day he’s apparently feeling well enough to demand that Hux bring him some fucking Ricola instead of this blue Hall’s bullshit, and Hux obliges, feeling obscurely responsible: he thinks, now, that he should have realized something was up when Ren spat all that unexpected venom at him in the shop, _how about you mind your fucking business, you officious sack of shit, or isn’t that something rich kids get taught how to do?_

The shop seems very quiet without him. Hux turns his own music up, but it’s not the same. He comes by Ren’s house the afternoon of the second day, Friday, with homework assignments and a bunch more green tea cough drops, and doesn’t stay long despite Ren’s apparent improvement. He spends the weekend studying for the history and English midterms, trying to ignore the fact that he is _much_ more tired than he ought to be. 

When he picks Ren up on Monday Hux is still tired, and starting to sound raspy; he has acknowledged to himself the inevitability of this development, but that doesn’t make it any nicer. He is, however, extremely well-versed at concealing things, for reasons, and puts effort into the conversation -- since Ren is apparently making up for not having much of a voice for the past few days by talking fucking nonstop, this is not as challenging as it might have been. 

But he’s tired, and after trudging around all day feeling as if he has an extra thirty pounds worth of rocks in his bookbag, he retires to the darkroom and just...sits down for a while, in the red dimness, not particularly wanting to get stuck in to the chemicals just this once. 

Hux greets the advent of each familiar symptom with glum resignation. That evening he’s already got the sore throat and the painful sinuses, and despite all his efforts Ren notices something’s not right, on the drive home, and demands to know what the deal is.

“You have it, don’t you,” he says. Hux stares grimly at the darkened road unspooling beneath his wheels. “You caught my cold.”

“That would seem to be a logical conclusion,” Hux says. 

“Shit. Uh. I’m...sorry?”

This is uncharacteristic enough for Hux to glance over at him. The hair is at about 30% of full deployment: he can see one of Ren’s eyes clearly. It is ringed with smudged black liner, and also looking directly at him, with a sort of weird hesitant expression. 

“Don’t be,” he tells Ren. “It was gonna happen. Anyway, it’s going around.”

“Still.” 

Hux shrugs. “Forget it, okay?” There’s enough of an edge on the words that Ren, blessedly, shuts up. When they get to his house Hux can tell he’s turning something over in his mind, fidgeting, and when he speaks it’s uncharacteristically tentative. 

“Um. You want to...come in, or something? Mom’s actually home already, like, if. If you wanted anything.”

Hux is touched despite himself. All he really wants is to get home, though. “Thanks,” he says. “That’s cool of you. It’s okay, though. Another time?”

“Sure,” says Ren, abruptly flushed with embarrassment, and fumbles for the doorhandle. Hux watches him go, reminded of so many things at once that he’s a little dizzy with it, and makes himself concentrate on the road instead. 

He falls asleep at his desk that night, and wakes in the small hours of the morning stiff and shivering and aching all over. Crawling into bed feels absurdly pleasant, and it seems as if only a minute or two has gone by when the alarm’s strident yelling drags him back out again. He spends so long in the shower that the hot water has started to run out, and emerges feeling just about as gross as he had when he’d stepped in. 

~

“You look awful,” says Phasma, at lunch. He’s wearing a blazer over his ordinary de facto uniform, and Ren had crowed with laughter over the leather patches on the elbows, and suggested he add a bow tie for the full effect. Sometimes Hux is very glad that Kylo Ren is quite as self-absorbed as he, in fact, is; it had been easy enough to distract him with a brief reference to their history teacher and sit back while Ren launched into a full diatribe on Mr. Wilton’s sartorial and pedagogical style. 

“Thanks very much,” he tells her, glowering over the steam from his coffee cup. “It’s the unquestioning support and encouragement of my friends which gets me through these difficult moments.”

“I mean it,” she says. “You’re really, really pale.”

“I’m okay,” Hux argues, and because Nemesis is a close personal friend of his this is apparently the cue for him to start coughing. His throat had stopped just hurting some time ago and has now developed a miserable kind of nagging tickle on top of the pain. 

Phasma regards him, eyes narrowed. “You should see the nurse.”

“I’m _fine_ ,” he says. “It’s a cold. If Ren’s a representative example it’s going to be over in a couple of days. I have to finish this project.”

She goes on looking at him narrowly for another moment or two and then sighs. “Fine. But I still think you should see the nurse.”

“If it gets bad, I will,” he says. He hasn’t touched the cookie he’d bought for lunch: the prospect of eating anything is profoundly unappealing, but at least the coffee helps a little. 

That afternoon he actually almost falls asleep in history class, sagging to one side in the seat until Mr. Wilton calls his name and jerks him back to full consciousness, blinking, and he doesn’t actually have the answer at his fingertips: it takes Hux a horrible few moments to access his memory files and come up with the date Wilton is asking for, and in those moments he is _very_ aware of everyone in the entire damn classroom staring at him. And wishes he hadn’t worn the jacket: it’s stuporously hot in here, no wonder he was drowsy, but the idea of taking it off seems like way too much effort. 

After class he packs up in a hurry before Mr. Wilton can ask if he’s okay -- Hux has developed something of a sixth sense for that, at this point in his life -- and retreats upstairs to the shop. He has two more exposure lengths he wants to try for the abstract ripple shot, and then all that’s left -- assuming he gets it right -- is matting and mounting, and he’ll be finished with the midterm almost a week early. Hux is not looking forward to mat-cutting, it’s his least favorite part of this whole business, but if it’s done _right_ it really does make a significant difference. 

Today, though, the work of exposing and processing isn’t an enjoyable task. Today he can’t really smell the chemicals, not with his nose stuffed up, but even without that he’s very aware of breathing in the fumes. His headache is bad enough by the time he finally finishes and pours everything back into its jugs that he’s actually feeling nauseated, and he’s been coughing steadily to the point where he actually goes rummaging through his bag to see if he has any of Ren’s cough drops left. _Still_ , he thinks, hanging up the prints to dry, _that’s fucking done with_ , and is conscious of a certain tired satisfaction. 

Ren is waiting for him when he comes out, and Hux notes that both of his eyes are visible at the same time. “What?” he says, when Ren continues to look at him. 

“You sound terrible,” Ren says. 

“Thanks. Get your stuff, let’s get out of here.”

“You sound worse than I did. I could hear you right through the darkroom wall.”

“I wasn’t aware it was a competition,” says Hux, pulling on his coat. 

“And in history class you, like, _didn’t know the answer_.”

_Christ_ , Hux thinks, running his hands through his hair. “First of all, fuck you, and secondly yeah I did know the answer. Can we maybe not go through the litany of your opinions regarding my performance right now? Is that a thing we can _not_ be doing?” 

He coughs, wincing. It’s really starting to hurt, not just in his throat but down in his chest as well. “Come on.”

Ren looks as if he’s about to argue further, but just shrugs and picks up his bookbag, the hair coming down with its little practiced shake. 

It’s not a particularly nice ride back to Ren’s this evening. Ren doesn’t try to start a conversation after the second or third time Hux shuts him down with a single syllable -- talking bothers his throat -- and Hux turns the radio on instead. Only when they’re at Ren’s house and he’s getting out does Ren make another attempt: “You should stay home tomorrow.”

Hux rolls his eyes. “If I need to stay home, I’ll stay home. Otherwise, see you in the morning.”

Ren slams the door, and he drives away, and is not at all sure why the car feels so weirdly cold all of a sudden, as if Ren had taken the warmth in the air with him. 

~

Hux’s house is one of several near-identical McMansions set in landscaped lots off a cul-de-sac. Arkanis Meadows is a gated community, and his SLK has a little transponder stuck to the windshield just under the rearview, but in point of fact anyone sufficiently determined can get the gate to open with a garage-door remote; the security is a lot less secure than it pretends to be. 

The houses, though. That’s different. Hux parks in the driveway and lets himself in the front door (there’s a portico, with pillars) and types in the disarm codes for the three separate security systems Brendol Hux had had installed before moving in. The codes are randomly generated and Hux’s father changes them every few months, and it is always a little fraught the first few days after a code change trying to remember the random string of numbers before the alarm goes off. 

The front door gives onto a two-level open-plan foyer, with the huge cavernous kitchen to his right and the sunken living-room to his left, and the staircase sweeping up to the second floor straight ahead: standing here by the door, the foyer ceiling above him goes all the way up to the skylights two stories up, and a chandelier hangs in the open space. When he sneezes, the sound echoes, hollowly, as if the house is empty; as if nothing living belongs in here, uninhabited and void. 

Hux drops his bookbag on the floor, grateful for the sense of safety, enclosure, _fortification_ that comes with the sealing of the door and the setting of the alarms, and -- doesn’t want to take his coat off. It’s cold in here, it always is when his father is away: the thermostats are set quite a long way down to save energy. 

He doesn’t want to eat dinner, either, or even contemplate the prospect of homework. All he really wants to do is curl up under his duvet and think of nothing. 

Hux compromises with a mug of tea -- black tea, with some sugar in, since they haven’t got anything else, he might actually put some stuff on the shopping list for Consuela if he remembers -- and takes the English assignment to bed with him, and gets about a quarter of the way in before he falls asleep. 

~

It hadn’t come as a surprise when Ren got a text from Hux early the next morning: _not coming in, can’t pick you up this am, sorry._ Ren had wondered why the hell Hux hadn’t just called, and then figured it was probably because he didn’t have much of a voice. Ren could sympathize.

It was weird riding in his mom’s van after so many mornings spent in Hux’s stupid car. The van was old -- was only a couple years off getting its _Historic_ tag -- but Ren’s mother refused to replace it, and in fact under the hood it was in pretty good shape: it just _looked_ like garbage. Ren hated driving it, except for the fact that it was better than _not_ driving anything at all; he rarely if ever got a chance to. 

His mom was the director of a charitable foundation downtown, and sat on a bunch of other foundation boards (which had made Ren laugh when he was a kid, picturing her running around sitting down on planks), _and_ ran an outreach center helping people apply for benefits, food stamps, Section 8, that kind of shit, which was why she kept such nutty hours. She was the most organized person Ren had ever seen, despite the dilapidated-looking van: she had like three different phones and was always talking to her assistants and running around the city getting shit done, and it made Ren tired just to think about it. He spent the ride to school slouched behind his hair, fiddling with his rings and listening to NPR on the van’s radio because Ms. Organa Solo refused to play any actual music in the mornings. 

Also he was a little surprised at how used he’d gotten to walking in from the parking lot, rather than climbing out of the van in the carpool lane, and it felt like everyone was staring at him. Especially when his mom leaned over to say “have a good day, honey” as he turned away. _Come on, Mom, jeez, I’m not like twelve years old_ , he thought.

There wasn’t time to go up to the shop before class, which -- he’d gotten used to having that, and it feels weird and _unbalanced_ , somehow, not being able to spend that half-hour with his projects before having to descend into the boring stupid grind that was actual high school. Ren keeps his phone in a handy pocket, in case Hux decides he wants to send any more texts, but after that initial message there’s been radio silence. 

Ren is trying not to notice how weird and abnormal the entire day is feeling, and not doing so great at it, and at lunch he sits in the corner normally reserved for Hux and Hux’s textbooks, eating ice cream and _glowering_ from under the hair at anyone passing by. The glower is pretty effective: a lot of people actually kind of recoil a little when they happen to cross eyes with him, and once he makes a dorky little freshman almost trip over his shoelaces, which offers Ren a modicum of mean satisfaction. 

It’s not totally effective, however. When a tall blonde girl approaches his table he turns it on her, full-bore, and gets nothing more than a cool look and a slightly raised eyebrow. 

She looks down at him, and Ren looks quite a long way up, and is about to say something like _how tall are you anyway_ when she forestalls him: “You must be Kylo Ren.”

“Yeah,” he says, still glowering, although he’s glad she had used _Ren_ and not the other option. What had Hux said his friend’s (friend, singular) name was? Something weird. “And you’re Plasma, right?”

The cool look doesn’t waver. “Phasma. With an H.”

“Right.” He crumples up his Snickers wrapper. “What do you want, Phasma with an H?”

He’s uncomfortably aware that she could probably bench-press him without too much difficulty. This is not a thing Ren is used to thinking about girls. Nor is he used to talking to them with his head craned back at this particular angle (or at all, for that matter).

“Do you know if Hux is okay?” she asks. “He’s your ride to school, so…”

“Yeah, he’s out sick today. Texted me this morning. I got a ride with my mom.”

Ren wonders what had possessed him to tell her that detail. She just nods. “Okay. I thought so, he looked terrible yesterday, but I wanted to make sure.”

“He _sounded_ terrible,” Ren says, again not entirely sure why, or why when she sits down and opens her lunchbag he’s actually kind of glad; it feels like the table is separated from the rest of the lunchroom, like some kind of weird VIP area, and they’re the only two who get to be there. Which may be why he says, glowering at the table, “I got him sick.”

“Probably,” Phasma agrees, and Ren looks up at her through the hair. She has one of those faces that looks placid but might actually be really efficient at hiding stuff going on underneath, Ren can’t tell. “And someone got _you_ sick, so blame whoever that was.”

Ren hadn’t thought of that, and snickers despite himself. “-- Yeah, okay.” 

She smiles a little, for a moment, and for the first time all fucking _day_ Ren feels a bit more...normal. Ordinary. Like today isn’t upsettingly strange.

It doesn’t last. Without Hux in the shop everything just doesn’t feel right, and he gets a little work done on a couple of pieces and breaks two saw blades in a row and yells _fuck it_ to the empty shop, the way he wouldn’t actually yell out loud if anyone else were there to hear him, and actually throws the ring shank he’s working on across the fucking room, and then has to go rootle around under the ceramic nerds’ drying racks to retrieve it, and everything _sucks_. Everything fucking blows _as well as_ sucking. Today can go to hell.

Ren even manages to stab himself in the finger with a pointy bit of scrap stock when he puts his stuff away, and he stands there watching the bead of dark blood swell and swell and eventually slip down the side of his hand, hot, like a tear. He sucks his finger, and the taste of pennies fills his mouth.

Meanwhile fucking Hux is probably being waited on hand and foot. _He probably has gourmet organic chicken noodle soup instead of the normal-person kind_ , Ren thinks, _and, like, weird expensive-flavored cough drops. Pomegranate, maybe_. 

The memory of Hux eating instant noodles out of a styrofoam cup comes to mind, and for a moment Ren pictures a rather different image, one with less luxury and comfort. He pushes it away. Huxley is probably having a much better time than _he_ is, cold or no cold. 

Ren slouches downstairs to await his mother, who -- fortunately -- is not working super late tonight, and tries not to mind the wait. And a bunch of other things, as well.

~

Hux had slept through Consuela’s ten o’clock visit -- she doesn’t come into his room, while he’s in it, that’s one of the unspoken agreements -- and trailed down to the kitchen around one, bare feet wincing on the tiles, to find something to eat. None of it looks even remotely appetizing, but he makes it through a Lean Cuisine with effort.

Ren’s kitchen had been less than half the size of this fucking cavern, but there had been stuff _in_ it. Like, ingredients to make food, not just stuff you added water to or nuked. There had been like six kinds of tea in the cabinet, and actual honey, and all kinds of things in cans, and leftovers in the fridge, and...he hadn’t been in there long, but it had felt _warm_ in a way that had nothing to do with central heating. By comparison every surface of this kitchen seems designed to draw away heat: the slate floor tiles, the polished granite countertops, the brushed steel of the appliances, even the dark-stained wood of the cabinets feels chilly. 

He is shivering in long rolling waves by the time he trudges back upstairs, which in itself feels like way more work than it should. His cough is now hurting quite a lot, but at least the sneezing seems to have stopped: Hux considers that an improvement. He crawls back into the wrinkled cocoon of duvet and blankets and curls up on his side, waiting to warm up again, for the shivering to stop. Eventually it does, and he drifts off to sleep.

He doesn’t know how much time is passing, waking now and then when the cough shakes him, but the next time he’s actually awake it is nighttime and snow is falling in great soundless clumps of white outside his window. He is too hot, much too hot, stifling under all his layers and the bedclothes, and he struggles free of them and goes over to sit in the windowseat and watch the snow with his arms wrapped around his drawn-up knees, wanting the coldness. 

The snow is dizzying, a world of whirling whiteness that comes and goes in waves, and when Hux looks away from the window everything _else_ is moving too, in a slow drawing drift. It fades, and comes back again, and this is fascinating to Hux. He barely notices himself coughing. It’s only when he starts to shiver again that he realizes he is no longer hot but cold, too cold, _very_ cold, and that he should do something about this; and it seems to take him a long time to get up and make his way back across the acre of carpet to his bed. 

His head is still full of swirling, vertiginous motion, and even lying still it feels unpleasantly as if the room is swinging around him, but Hux is too tired to really mind very much. _In the morning_ , he thinks, _in the morning this will be better, because it needs to be, because I have shit to do. It will be better, in the morning._

Sleep like a dark tide closes over his head. 

~


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> illustrations by [kromitar](http://kromitar.tumblr.com/)!

_When you're beautiful and dying_   
_All the world that you've denied_

\-- Hole

Hux is not at school the next day. Or the one after that. 

Ren eats lunch with Phasma, because she comes over to sit with him, and he finds he doesn’t actually want to be nasty enough to make her go away again: and it turns out she’s even kind of funny, in a dry understated way that makes him think a little bit of Hux. You wouldn’t think it to look at her, she’s built like a brick shithouse and apparently actually enjoys sports, but she’s...okay company. If he has to share his table with anybody, that is. 

~

~

It _sucks_ being alone in the shop. (Not so long ago, he’d have fucking _rejoiced_ to be alone in the shop, but Ren is trying not to think about that.) He’s taken to playing his music loud again, and that and the distraction of work is helpful, but he still keeps finding himself expecting to see Hux come out of the darkroom, keeps thinking _wonder what Huxley’s gonna say when he sees this_ as he finishes up a piece. The cuttlebone casting hadn’t gone entirely according to plan, but Ren knows what he did wrong and the second time he tries it Mr. Tekka even says it came out really well. 

(It’s pretty cool, but it _reeks_. You take the cuttlebone and cut it in half -- it’s this sort of oval white styrofoam-looking thing about five or six inches long -- and sand down the sides to fit perfectly together, and then you either put something hard between them and press the sides together to leave a hollow impression, or carve out the shape by hand, with an open funnel to the top where the silver goes in. Then you wire the two halves tight together and clamp them upright, and melt your silver in a crucible, and pour it into the mold, and the entire shop stinks of burning hair for like five minutes. Then you cut the wire and pull the halves of the mold apart and you have this still-super-hot silver cast of whatever the hollow shape was, with a big cone at the top, and it’s got this cool kind of wood-grainy texture effect because of the structure of the cuttlebone itself. But the smell is fucking _terrible_.)

Phasma offers him a ride home, the third day of Hux’s absence; she’s going to Hux’s house to drop off his homework assignments, and Ren’s place is on the way. Since Ren’s mom has a fundraiser that evening and won’t be able to come get him until stupidly late, he agrees. Grudgingly. Because, well. He doesn’t know her. 

Apparently you don’t play lacrosse in the winter, so she has basketball instead, and stays after school for practice; when she shows up in the shop, short hair still damp from the showers, Ren is actually kind of maybe a little bit glad to see her. 

She looks out of place here, but she doesn’t seem to feel it; ambling over with her gym bag slung on one shoulder, she asks Ren what he’s making, and his initial instinct (hackles-raised snarling) gives way to a lame kind of excitement: he’s...okay, fine, he’ll admit it, he’s _missed_ showing this stuff to somebody other than Mr. Tekka. (Who says he’s doing good work, and has even dangled the possibility of fucking around with _enamels_ as a study for next semester.)

Ren shows her the second, more successful casting -- the impression of a shark’s tooth he picked up on a beach when he was a little kid, rendered in sterling with those bone-grain ripples like tiny map-contour lines across it -- and the in-progress poison ring. Which is actually _not_ trying to be symmetrical, for once. It’s based on a picture he saw in the physics textbook of flow over an airfoil, the oval stone tilted at a sharp angle of attack with lines of silver parting around it and a scatter of tiny silver balls in its wake. The stone he’s going to use is the plainest of his agates because the busy banding shit going on in the other ones will argue with the setting. 

Phasma tilts the half-built ring between her fingertips. They are surprisingly deft, for such big hands. He has the shank and the lower bezel complete, and is leaving the hinge and the upper bezel for tomorrow. “This is really cool,” she says. “Not just the...workmanship? I guess that’s the word. The actual design is cool.”

He tucks hair behind his ear and launches into an explanation of the construction process, not even really noticing the enthusiasm in his own voice. Hux already knows all this, but Ren hasn’t had a chance to talk to anyone else about it in a long time, and he’s gratified that she actually pays attention. 

When they leave it’s snowing again, a little, just the occasional flake swirling out of a dirty-grey afternoon sky. Phasma’s car is an old early-nineties Corolla, pale blue, with rust in the wheel wells and a litter of oil quart bottles behind the passenger seat. It’s worlds away from Hux’s stupid car, and Ren realizes again how much he’s actually come to like the SLK. Which he still needs to come up with a name for. He tells her that, and then shakes down the hair in a hurry because _seriously what the fuck, why had he even mentioned that_ , he doesn’t need to see her expression. 

“It can’t be something like _Enterprise_ ,” she says, beyond the curtain of Ren’s hair, and he blinks and pulls it aside again to observe her looking mildly thoughtful. She doesn’t drive with Hux’s somewhat anal attention to the rules, which is kind of refreshing. 

“Huh?” Ren says, brilliantly. 

“The car. If you’re gonna give it a starship name, it can’t be something all...responsible and big and famous. It’s got to be flashy and dumb.”

“That’s what I thought,” Ren says, astonished. “Dumber than _Firefly_ anyhow.”

“Which is kind of saying a lot.” Phasma smiles for a moment. 

When they get to his house he’s about to get out and just stops, looking back at her. “Um. Say hi to Huxley for me, okay?”

“I will,” and there’s another of those brief little smiles. “See you tomorrow, Ren.”

~

He doesn’t...know what time it is. 

Hux keeps losing track of time; he’d put his watch down somewhere and can’t remember where, or when, and he isn’t _entirely_ sure what _day_ it is, either (he’s pretty sure it’s Thursday) but that’s alarming so he doesn’t think about it very much. 

He had remembered to put a grocery list on the fridge -- with tape, because they don’t have fridge magnets -- just a request for a few items in his small somehow apologetic handwriting, and then he’d been asleep again and when he woke up Consuela had come and gone and left a shopping bag from the Giant on the kitchen counter. It had shocked Hux to find that not only had she bought the stuff he’d asked for, but that there was an extra box of herbal tea in the bag, with a sticky-note attached to it: hope you feel better!, with a smily face. He wasn’t sure why he’d felt so very much like crying, standing there on the freezing floor-tiles with the note stuck to his finger, but it had been hard not to give in to the urge. 

That had been...ago. Hux knows he’s supposed to be doing things, that he’s got work due, that he should be keeping busy, but for some reason he can’t concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time. It’s probably something to do with the way he can’t get _warm_ , even though he’s wearing several layers and has even taken the unheard-of liberty of _turning up the thermostat_ a little. Maybe you can’t think when you’re cold. 

When you have a cold. 

He thinks of Ren, and wonders how he’s been getting to school these past...few days. Ren had only been sick for two days, and Hux is not entirely sure if this is his third or fourth day, which -- again, is alarming, so he doesn’t think too hard about it. He will get better, because that is how this works, and he’s doing all the right things, isn’t he? The OTC cold-and-flu stuff tastes like hell but he takes it anyway, even if it doesn’t seem to be doing much, and he’s drinking tea, so.

Hux has determined that the only reliable way to prevent the long miserable exhausting fits of coughing is not to breathe very deeply. This is difficult, but it’s better than the alternative: sometimes the cough goes on for long enough that he starts to get sparkly blurs crowding the edges of his vision, and color drains out of the world for a little while until he can get his breath back. And it hurts. It...kind of feels like something’s _hitting_ him in the chest, hard, over and over, during the worst of it. So he breathes in careful sips of air, and doesn’t listen to the weird noises it’s making, and...drifts. 

And, drifting, _dreams_ : confusing, upsetting images fading into one another, fragments of memory: he’s a little kid, too little to understand what’s happening, and crying despite himself because this is _frightening_ , he can’t _breathe_ , everything hurts. And time shifts, he’s ten or eleven, old enough now to know that you don’t _complain_ , you don’t _whine_ , and he’s drowning, he’s drowning in clear air that he can’t get to through the terrible stuff that fills his chest, and there are sirens and bright lights and everything loses traction and falls away from him into a complicated blackness full of moving stars --

The doorbell wakes him. For a nasty moment he’s not sure _when_ he is, and then time falls back into place with a thud. 

Hux gets off the couch on his second attempt, leaving the blankets where they are, and wonders who the hell could be at the door, who’d come to see him, unless school truant officers are still a thing. They’re not, right? He is shivering, and it’s not easy to keep control of his breathing as he disarms all the alarms and unlocks the door and blinks up at...Phasma? 

Phasma is here, at his house, and he is not sure why, and she is also now looking _horrified_ , and he’s not sure why that is, either, but he can’t really spare much thought for that particular question because just then despite his careful shallow breathing Hux’s cough attacks him, viciously painful, and he has to hold on to the doorframe and squeeze his eyes shut and wait for it to be over. 

~

The next day when Phasma walks into the cafeteria, Ren waves. A little. Just, like, casual, _hey, what’s up_ , like that. She comes over to his corner table, which is now definitively their table, the three of them, Ren has determined this to be the case, and...he frowns up at her. 

“You okay?” he says, despite himself. She does not look okay. She looks...really tired, and kind of unhappy. “Shit, did I give the crud to you too?”

Phasma blinks at him. “What? Oh. No. I’m fine.”

“You sure?” This is entirely unlike Ren and he knows it. 

“Yes,” she snaps, and Ren cannot stop his shoulders from hunching, dammit, _dammit_. She sighs, and pushes back her hair. “Sorry. Yeah, I’m okay. Just tired, I guess.”

He doesn’t push, because behind the hair his face is still hot from embarrassment. Maybe she had a rough time in gym class or something. She unwraps her sandwich and they eat in awkward silence for a while, before Ren brings up the subject the two of them are least bad at talking about: “So Hux is still out sick?”

Something he can’t identify crosses her face -- for a moment he can tell what she’s going to look like in ten, twenty years -- and then she nods. “Yeah, he’s still not feeling well.”

“It’s been, like…” Ren folds up his Snickers wrapper. “A while now.”

“Yeah,” Phasma says again. “He’ll be okay, though.”

“Did you give him all the homework? Did he do that face, you know, the one where he’s like _I see you not using a coaster_?”

Phasma actually laughs, looking a little startled. “Shit, that’s the best description of that face I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s like...less intense than the _you’re a particularly gross species of fungus_ expression, but kind of on the same, you know. Thing. Spectrum.”

She smiles that brief slightly crooked smile he’s seen a few times now. “I don’t think I know that one.”

“It’s like this.” Ren tries to remember the exact combination of haughty disgust and vague fascination that Hux had spent weeks using on him, at the beginning of the semester. He can’t do it, exactly, he doesn’t have the...bone structure, or something, but he makes a valiant effort, and is rewarded by seeing Phasma crack the fuck up. She goes pink when she laughs. “Hey, c’mon, I’m being serious here,” he says, lying, and she leans back in her chair, still convulsed with mirth, and Ren feels...weirdly good, about that, for some reason. 

~

That afternoon she shows up unasked in the shop, earlier than yesterday -- practice got cancelled because the _coach_ now has whatever’s going around, Ren feels a little less guilty now -- and drags over a stool from the ceramics nerds’ worktable to watch him work. 

~

~

She asks first, but Ren is getting less and less surprised by how much he doesn’t mind her hanging around, and he just shrugs, _sure, if you want to, just don’t get in the way_ , and it’s...weird, working with an audience. He’s used to it during class, when he gets to do all the cool shit and the regular shop class kids are still fucking around with dapping blocks and jewelry saws, they’re not even onto setting stones yet, but having a concentrated focused audience of _one_ is new to him. 

But Phasma’s not the kind of watcher who makes you feel self-conscious. And when she asks questions, it’s not right in the middle of something delicate, so his concentration doesn’t get fucked up, and when he asks her to hand him something she passes it to him smooth and quick so he kind of feels like a surgeon, and it’s...well, it’s pretty cool, that’s all. 

He finishes the upper bezel of the poison ring while she watches, and finds himself starting to lecture -- remembers Hux, in the red darkness, talking as he worked -- and spares a glance at her: she looks _interested_ , and intent. 

Ren takes the clean bezel out of the pickle, rinses it, dries it carefully, and starts to mix up the epoxy. “The glue isn’t actually like 100% necessary,” he says, “if the bezel fits the stone well enough and it’s set properly, but since the stone is kinda see-through I want to seal it down to the silver so the metal can’t tarnish underneath and fuck with the color, if that makes sense.”

“Sure,” she says, wrinkling her nose at the smell. He actually kind of likes it, but maybe that’s because it means he’s almost done with a piece, it’s like...the smell of not-quite-but-almost victory. He mixes up the resin and hardener carefully, so as not to get too many bubbles into the goop, and spreads an even layer of it on the inside of the bezel. “-- Where did you learn all this, anyhow?” she adds. “Did you do this stuff before you came here?”

“Yeah.” Ren picks up his stone, examines it for the last time, and presses it firmly into the silver socket constructed to receive it, with a satisfying click. “At my old school. I got into a bunch of trouble so I kinda...got kicked out, but they had a good arts program and I took what I guess is the equivalent of Metal Shop I and II. Everything else sucked.”

He’s still not sure how come he’s...like, baring his fucking _soul_ to Huxley’s athletic friend, but Ren’s getting used to this as a thing that is happening. It’s cool as long as nobody else finds out. “This is, like, the one thing I don’t hate.”

Phasma nods. “I think everybody’s got the one thing they don’t hate,” she says. “Where did you go before this?”

Ren picks up the little steel-bladed burnisher and begins to smooth the edges of the bezel firmly over the stone, locking it in place. “New Republic High,” he says. “On the other side of the city. It’s kind of a fucked-up school, to be honest. I like this place better. It has a pond.”

Phasma laughs. “Yeah, I guess that’s a point in its favor. And the woods are cool. You ever go out in the woods?”

“Nope.” Ren finishes bending the silver over the stone. “I gotta polish this first before I put it all together, hang on.”

Another thing that’s not annoying about Phasma is that she just nods and stays where she is, instead of trying to carry on a conversation when he’s got a face shield on and the buffing wheel is making a ton of noise. Ren is kind of glad he doesn’t fuck it up with her watching, though, it’s easy to lose your grip on something small when you’re leaning it into the wheel and have it ricochet off the plywood behind the buffer and fly right over your shoulder, and then you have to spend like ten minutes hunting for it under all the equipment. He likes the way the metal heats up in his grip, the way it feels almost _alive_ as the white blankness turns to bright gleaming silver. There’s...he’s not good with words, he kind of sucks at them to be honest, but there’s something weirdly magic about this part of the job. Transformative. 

(If Ren is entirely honest with himself, he feels just a tiny bit like a god, here in the shop, making things out of metal and fire. Like one of the old gods out of mythology, the kind that’s really into _smiting_. When he’s particularly pissed off at the entire universe for being a sack of miserable horseshit, coming up here and _making things_ eases the anger for a little while. It’s better than doing what he used to do, which was throwing hardcore motherfucking tantrums and fighting the other kids until either he or they were bleeding, he didn’t care which.)

~

An hour later he and Phasma walk out of the building together, and not only does Ren have a brand-new ring on his right hand (nothing in its secret compartment, as of yet), but he’s aware of feeling kind of better about _things_ in general than he had this morning. He doesn’t even realize he’s left his hair up in its knot until they get outside and his ears freeze: apparently now there are _two_ people who get to see all of his face, not just the bits the hair doesn’t cover. 

She drops him off at his house, with a promise to say hi to Hux when she sees him (and convey the news that the motherfucking poison ring is finally done), and Ren slouches inside to find his mom already home and actively engaged in making dinner. It’s Friday, which is normally one of her busiest nights.

“I thought you had a thing tonight,” he says, dropping his bookbag on the stairs. “Didn’t you have a thing?”

“Hi, honey, it’s nice to see you too,” she says, looking up from chopping carrots. “Lanny Villecham cancelled, he’s got the flu. It’s going around.”

Lanever Villecham III runs one of the richest foundations in the city, and Ren’s mom is one of like maybe six people who get to call him “Lanny” without serious repercussions. 

“I guess so, a lot of kids at school are sick,” he says. “Hux is still out.”

His mom has gone back to work; now she looks up again, frowning. “That seems like an awfully long time,” she says. “I hope he’s all right.”

It’s been...actually, yeah, Ren counts backward. Almost a week now. Four days? Shit, how long can you even _have_ a cold? But if it’s the flu…

“Does he have anyone taking care of him?” she asks.

“He lives with his dad, but I think he’s off on a business trip or something.” Ren shrugs. “His friend Phasma’s taking him homework and stuff. She gave me a ride home.”

That makes her smile. It’s the smile that shows up on all the board-of-trustees pages, and it also kind of makes Ren feel uncomfortably like he’s a little kid again, and he tugs the elastic out of his hair and lets it fall. “I’m making soup,” she says. “You could take some over to his house tomorrow, if you want to borrow Luke’s car.”

“Seriously?” He pushes back the hair. She _never_ lets him take his uncle’s car. “I can borrow the Triumph?”

“If you promise to be careful,” she says. “Very careful. Remember to use the turn signals.”

“They don’t _work_ ,” Ren says, and -- before he can think too much about it -- goes over to his mom and wraps his arms around her waist in a brief and awkward hug.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> illustrated by [kromitar](http://kromitar.tumblr.com/) :D

_When the water is too deep_  
_You can close your eyes and really sleep tonight_  
_Your beauty blinds_

\-- Hole

 

Ren isn’t exactly a _bad_ driver. He just...doesn’t have a lot of practice. And his uncle’s tiny old piece-of-shit sports car has a bitchy gearbox, you kind of have to stir around for third every time, and then it doesn’t always go in all the way. Also he sucks at hill starts. 

He has only stalled twice by the time he arrives at Hux’s development, which is pretty good, Ren thinks, and for some reason the gate is actually open: he doesn’t have to convince some security-guard asshole that he’s not there to ransack all the rich people’s houses. Not that he _couldn’t_ , of course. He’s just glad not to have to. 

Hux’s stupid car is parked in the driveway of Number 8, Scaparus Close, because apparently every street name in Arkanis Meadows has to be fucking bizarre. (Ren has passed Vensenor Vale and right next to it Venator Way, among others.)

He pulls up behind the Mercedes and remembers to leave the TR7 in gear when he parks, but only just. The contrast between the two cars is...kind of really funny, actually, in a weird and unsettling way. Luke’s car is mostly orange, except for where it’s bondo grey and primer white, and getting on for 30; Hux’s is sleek gleaming silver and not even two years old. 

And it still needs a name. 

He’s turning that over in his head as he walks up to the mansion’s front door. Phasma had been right, he couldn’t call it something like “Enterprise,” it needed to be dumb and impressive at the same time. Maybe “Destructor,” although that wasn’t a spaceship, that was the evil chick from _Ghostbusters_ \-- but something _like_ that. _The Destructor_ , he thinks, and snickers to himself, leaning on the doorbell. 

It...kind of takes a while before anything happens. Ren has the time to wonder if he actually should have maybe called first, to make sure Hux was, like, _awake_ or whatever, but eventually the door is unlocked (he can hear more than one bolt sliding back) and opens to reveal Hux in one of those fancy-ass bathrobes that has an initial on the pocket. Like he’s Hugh Hefner or something, Ren thinks. 

(This is actually his second impression: his first is _holy shit, he looks terrible_. Hux is visibly thinner, which is not an improvement, the bones of his face sharp under the surface. He’s so pale that the faint spray of freckles across the bridge of his nose is visible; the circles under his eyes look _bruised_. Somehow worst of all, though, is the fact that his hair isn’t neatly parted and combed back: it falls in an untidy copper-gold ruffle almost over one eye.)

“What are _you_ doing here?” Hux asks, in evident puzzlement. His voice also sounds awful, kind of like he’s been gargling with gravel. 

Ren stops staring and thrusts the box he’s carrying at Hux, very glad of his own cloaking-device hair right at this precise moment. “Here,” he says, trying to sound casual. “My mom went kind of nuts in the kitchen yesterday. There’s soup, and brownies and stuff.”

Hux blinks at him, and then down at the box, and takes it -- looking absolutely astonished. “Oh,” he says, and then “Thank you,” and then, finally, “Come in?”

Wow, when Huxley’s _this_ pale his eyes really stand out. The orange eyelashes look darker than usual against the colorless skin. Ren wishes he hadn’t just noticed that. (And that he hadn’t just thought of what Hux might look like with mascara on, because seriously, what the fuck.)

The house had looked impressive from outside: on the inside it’s...kind of really weirdly _impersonal_. It makes Ren think of pictures in the kind of rich-people magazines you find in waiting rooms, how to decorate your house so that nobody can actually live in it. He’s briefly, suddenly grateful for how small and ordinary his own house is in contrast. 

Hux carries the box into a huge empty designer kitchen that could be a cooking-show set. In his bathrobe he looks absurdly small, somehow, upsettingly fragile. Ren looks away; to his left there are a couple of steps leading down into a living room, or whatever you called it in a mansion like this: huge, luxurious leather couches in a kind of beige-grey color, a glass coffee table with a bunch of pointless decorative objects on it, a big fireplace in the corner. The only signs of human habitation are the blankets on one end of the couch and the history textbook on the floor beside it, and an empty mug on the coffee table -- carefully placed on a coaster.

That makes Ren think of Phasma, and _that_ makes him think of how old she’d looked, how worn and unhappy, and he can maybe understand that a little better now he’s gotten a good look at Hux. He shoves his hands in his pockets, aware of the fact that it’s not all that warm in here. 

“This is...really nice of your mom,” Hux says, sounding weird, and Ren turns to see him looking at a tupperware container of brownies as if he’s going to fucking _cry_ or something, and -- nope, Ren can’t deal with that, not at all. He looks away hurriedly.

“She always makes too much stuff,” he says, kind of wishing he hadn’t come over after all, and trails down the steps to the living room. “It’s like, hey, Mom, remember there’s just two people in this house most of the time? I mean, it’s good, though. She’s pretty good at cooking, when she has time.”

“It’s nice of her,” Hux repeats. “Like. Thanks. Thank her for, uh. Thinking of me?” He still sounds a little astonished, as if this is not a concept that he finds easy to parse. “And thanks for...bringing it over.”

“No problem,” he says, bending over to poke at the things on the coffee table. There are two round objects that kind of look like rubber-band balls made out of twigs, sitting in a shallow porcelain dish. They appear to serve absolutely no purpose other than to need dusting. Ren kind of wonders where you even _buy_ shit like this. 

“Do you...uh, want anything?” Hux asks, from the kitchen. “There’s Coke, I think.”

He sits down, sinking into the butter-soft leather of the couch. _Okay,_ he thinks, _this is weird, this is all intensely fucking weird, but just deal with it._ “Sure,” he says out loud. “That’d be good. Thanks.”

Beside the empty mug on the table there’s something else he hadn’t noticed at first: an inhaler. Ren reaches over to pick it up, with ill-mannered curiosity, and then goes very still. 

He doesn’t know what _corticosteroid powder_ is, but it doesn’t sound good. Or why you’d want to be inhaling powder in the first place. But the label on this thing comes from the _hospital_ pharmacy, not CVS or Walgreens: Yavin Memorial Hospital. Dated two days ago. _What the fuck?_

Ren looks up at Hux as he comes over with Coke in a...okay, that’s got to be an actual _crystal_ glass, it’s all faceted and glittering. “When the hell were you going to mention you’d been _hospitalized?_ ” he asks, brandishing the inhaler. His stomach feels weird, kind of cold and heavy at the same time.

Hux frowns, setting down the glass -- on, of course, a coaster -- and reaches out for it. “I wasn’t hospitalized,” he says. “Give me that, I shouldn’t have left it lying around, it’s untidy.”

“It came from the hospital. It says so on the label, right after your name,” Ren insists, not handing it over. 

“It came from the hospital _pharmacy_ ,” Hux says, staring at him. “I wasn’t _admitted_ , not that it’s actually any of your business, I was just in the ER for a few hours, that’s all.”

Ren’s eyes are wide. The idea of being sick enough to _go to the ER_ is...kind of fucking terrifying, that’s something that doesn’t _happen_ to people his age, it’s for...like, broken bones and heart attacks and gunshot wounds, and -- “And you were just...never going to mention this? At all?”

“Why would I?” Hux sits on the arm of the couch, still staring at him. “It was a couple of days ago, Ren. Nobody needed to know.”

“Nobody needed to know?” Ren repeats, and then, louder, “You were sick enough to have to go to the _emergency room_ , and you think _nobody needed to know_? Like, what the _fuck_ , are you secretly in some kind of pain-and-suffering-is-good-for-me religious cult? Is this something you do _regularly_?" He is actually shouting, now, and it echoes in this horrible cold empty space, much too loudly. 

Hux is _still_ staring at him, as if Ren is making no sense whatsoever. “Why would I have told anybody? It...it happened, they fixed me, it's over, it's _not anybody else's problem but my own_. No one needed to know.”

He sits perfectly still for a moment, as if Hux has stunned him somehow, and then he throws the inhaler squarely at Hux's chest, hard enough to sting. "Fuck you," he snaps, "I guess you'd be fine with dying _alone_ in your _enormous mansion_ , and it wouldn't be _anyone else's problem_. Sure. _Whatever_."

He isn't even sure himself why he's this upset. It's something about how...fragile Hux looks, how he apparently doesn't trust _anyone_ ; Ren thinks maybe he's actually insulted. Yeah. That's it. He's… _insulted_ , that Hux wouldn't even mention a giant thing like this to him.

“I’m _not_ anyone else’s problem,” Hux says, sounding very strange, and then leans over to pick up the inhaler from the carpet, and -- the movement must have done something to him, because he begins to cough. It sounds _terrible_ , it sounds like something being repeatedly torn apart, hard and uncontrollable and painful, and he curls over with one arm wrapped around himself to brace his chest, and Ren is fucking horrified. 

“Oh, jesus,” he says, raw-voiced, wavering. It feels like something in the world has broken, just shattered awfully all over the floor, all his fault as fucking usual, and he reaches over and flattens his palm against Hux's back, pressure and warmth, trying to do _something_ to help. He can feel all of Hux's ribs, sharply, through the layers he’s wearing, feel how viciously hard he is being made to work, and that is also terrible.

The touch seems to help a little, though. Maybe. The coughing eases; when he can breathe again Hux stays where he is, hunched over, eyes squeezed shut, as if he’s afraid to move for setting it off again, and Ren...does not take his hand away, for the same reason. “Sorry,” Hux rasps, at last. 

“No, _I’m_ sorry,” Ren says, realizing that he actually means it. “I, uh. Shouldn’t have thrown the inhaler at you.”

That actually gets a little spasm of laughter out of Hux, and for a moment it seems as if he’s going to start coughing again, but he gets it under control. “No,” he agrees. “That was dumb.”

“I was pissed off.” It’s...kind of an apology? He's still _touching_ Hux. He -- doesn't really want to stop, but in a minute this is going to get weird and Hux is going to be offended, isn't he, and Ren is pretty sure he couldn't bear that, so he very gently takes his hand back. 

Hux gives a little sigh, and slides down from the arm of the couch to sit properly beside him. He pushes back his hair, which has fallen over one eye again, and looks at Ren sideways. He’s still flushed with the effort of coughing -- and with embarrassment. "I still...I don't really get why. I mean. Why you're pissed. It just...this isn't that big a deal? To me?"

Ren blinks at him, trying to fit how _he really doesn't get it_ into some kind of sensible picture. "It'd be a big deal to _me_ ," he says, after a while. "Weren't you -- fuck. Freaked out? You're totally alone, you get so sick you have to go to the ER...and then you, what, hide it? Does Phasma even know? Does your dad?"

Hux goes subtly pinker. "It's not like it's the first time," he says, and then "Um. Actually -- don't start throwing shit again, but, uh, Phasma's the one who took me. She came over to give me the homework assignments and kind of...got real worried and drove me to the hospital instead.” He’s not looking at Ren. “I didn't...think anybody else needed to know about it. My father’s in Frankfurt for a conference, he won’t be back till next week." 

Ren sighs. He can see Phasma’s face at lunch, the day after this had all gone down, tired and unhappy, and wonders how godawful the whole business must have been. Like...he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t have been able to deal with it, if he’d come over to find Hux seriously ill. Ren doesn’t know what he would have done. Freaked out, first of all, and then called 911, or maybe -- embarrassingly -- his mom, instead of just taking charge of the situation himself. He can very easily picture Phasma in charge. And he’s...trying not to think about the idea of _not telling Hux’s father_ about this business, because that’s kind of terrifying on its own. 

He's annoyed, now. Annoyed, and _worried_. And maybe jealous. And...wait. What had Hux said? "What do you mean it's not the first time? Is this something you do a lot?"

Hux is turning the inhaler over and over in his fingers. Thin fingers. "Not a _lot_. I mean. I've...had something like this before, a few times, it was pretty bad when I was like ten years old, and I know there was another time when I was a little kid but I don't remember much. It's not pneumonia this time, anyway. Or not really. They let me go and everything."

He is not good at being reassuring, although this is apparently what he’s attempting to do. In fact he is extremely fucking awful at being reassuring, and Ren would like to tell him so. His anger drains away, leaving with it just a kind of miserable, tired sadness. "This time," he repeats. "Fuck this shit, Hux, don't people _die_ from pneumonia?"

"Well -- I mean they _can_ , but, like -- I'm okay, Ren? I was dumb, but I'm okay, I'm gonna be fine, I'm not _dying_." He leans a little closer, looking anxiously at him. 

Abruptly Ren is utterly embarrassed to have been so vocally, completely concerned. "Well _good_ ," he says, and can't quite meet Hux's eyes. "Just don't do it again, okay?"

"I won't," says Hux, fiddling with the inhaler again, looking away. "I already promised Phasma. But I won't.” His shoulders hunch. “I’m...sorry."

There's nothing about how Hux looks right now which is okay; Ren feels guilty, to have made him this upset, and at the same time he's still pissed off about the whole stupid mess. "It's okay," he says. " _If_ you don't do it again. Jesus fucking Christ."

Hux looks over at him, after a long moment, and pushes back the untidy hair again. "So," he says, in a small voice. "Um. We could...order pizza or something. And you could tell me about what I’ve missed this week and...like. Also tell me about your car, cause I didn't know you had one."

 

~

 

Hux had _not_ been expecting to see Kylo Ren on his doorstop. Ever, but particularly not right now, and not holding a box full of _things_ which he pushed gruffly toward Hux.

He’d had a bad moment unpacking the box in the kitchen -- two containers of soup, a box each of cookies and brownies -- but, as he had with Consuela’s smily-face note, managed not to cry. The thought of Ren’s mysterious and apparently super-busy mother taking the time to make and send actual homemade food to some random kid she didn’t even know was so vastly improbable he couldn’t wrap his head around it. He put things away neatly in the empty kitchen, which now had real food in it for probably the first time ever, and was really glad Ren’s mom hadn’t included a note in her care package: he is absolutely sure that would have turned on the waterworks, and he was mortified enough to have Ren see him like this without that added layer of fail.

And he’d left the stupid inhaler on the table, like an idiot. The other one’s upstairs with the bottles of giant horrible pills, but he’d forgotten to put this one back in his pocket and Ren had apparently never gotten the memo that reading other people’s prescription labels was a) rude and b) probably a violation of HIPAA or something, and…

Hux is still not entirely sure why Ren’s so ticked off about not being given a play-by-play account of the thrilling evening he and Phasma had spent sitting around in Yavin Memorial’s emergency department. Personally he would prefer to forget as much of that experience as he could, and a lot of it is in fact kind of hazy, but Ren seems to take it as a personal insult that he wasn’t told.

_What would I even have done,_ Hux thinks tiredly, _sent over a fucking singing telegram saying HEY REN, GUESS WHAT I DID LAST NIGHT?_ It was bad enough that he’d _needed_ to be taken to the hospital; he can’t help feeling that he should have been able to throw this off by himself, that his immune system’s dereliction of its duty represents a personal failing. After all, Ren had gotten over this by himself in a couple of days. It was...inexcusable that Hux should have allowed it to defeat him.

But Phasma had made him promise to call her, or if not her then at least _somebody_ , if it ever started to get that bad again. If he was in trouble. He doesn’t think she knows how much that promise cost him, as a tacit admission that he is incapable of handling situations and requires to be rescued from them. It is a very, very good thing that Brendol Hux is not here -- although, Hux does have to concede, had his father been present it is likely he would have been taken to a doctor a little earlier than was the case. 

The last time he’d had this, in Detroit, had been bad enough to involve an ambulance, and when he could think in a straight line again Hux had overheard a few snatches of conversation: a doctor talking to his father. There were words like _susceptible_ and _vulnerable_ and _predisposed_ , none of which had really made sense to ten-year-old Hux, still hazy and half-asleep; but after that, he had found himself being taken to the doctor’s office rather more frequently, and that less emphasis was placed on toughing things out. This did not represent an alteration in _opinion_ on his father’s part, more a kind of resigned and displeased disappointment: another aspect of Hux the Younger that did not meet standards. 

He pushes the thought away. Ren is talking about his uncle’s car, looking less unhappy and more animated; like Hux, he tends to talk with his hands, and the rings gleam and flash with his gestures. It sounds like it wants a new gearbox, or possibly just to be retired from the field, but Hux is a little impressed -- okay, a lot impressed -- that Ren can drive it at all. He’s watching the hands move, large clever capable hands, and the thought comes unbidden into Hux’s mind that it had been...really kind of awesome, that moment when Ren had done such an un-Renlike thing as to actually reach out and touch him, put a steadying hand on his back. People don’t _do_ stuff like that to Hux. Mostly there aren’t people _around_ to do that kind of thing, but he just...doesn’t have a frame of reference; he’d held on to Phasma’s hand for a little while, that evening at the hospital, and that had been...probably the first time they had held any kind of contact for very long. But...Ren’s hand on his back had been astonishing, and unexpected, and _nice_.

They had ordered pizza -- Ren had made the call, since Hux doesn’t trust himself to hold a conversation right now without coughing -- and argued a little over what was and was not acceptable as a pizza topping. He is glad to know that Ren agrees with his definition of pineapple on pizza as an atrocity, but thinks he is an uncultured philistine regarding the obvious acceptability of olives; in the end they had just settled on pepperoni. 

(One thing the empty kitchen does contain, neatly tucked away in a drawer, is a folder full of delivery menus. Several of the local establishments have Hux’s regular order written down somewhere, because every time the caller ID shows his number it means that the driver is going to make a 100% tip on that particular delivery. Hux knows it’s a pretty shit job, and feels a little less guilty about making someone drive all the way out here with pizza if he throws in some extra cash. And perhaps there’s a little tiny spark of defiance in it, somewhere; he doesn’t use his allowance for very many things, and those he does are a conscious and deliberate decision.)

“-- and like, okay, so he bailed and literally went off to Tibet to go get his mind serene, or his chakras aligned or whatever. That was a while ago. He still keeps in touch, he writes Mom these long-ass letters by hand because I guess the places where he’s staying don’t have internet or something, they show up covered in all these weird stamps like a couple of months after he put them in the mail. It sounds pretty cool, though, at least the parts of the letters she’s read to us.”

Hux is trying to picture this ex-gearhead uncle of Ren’s sitting around on top of a mountain surrounded by prayer flags, and completely failing. “So he actually converted? Not just kind of _hey this is a pretty neat philosophy_ , like actually spiritually converted?”

“Mom says you don’t _convert_ to Buddhism like you do to Christianity,” Ren says, tucking hair behind his ear. There are safety pins threaded along the bar of his industrial piercing, and Hux is impressed: only Ren could render the common safety pin completely and utterly useless while making an overt statement about the hardcoreness of his soul. “There’s these Four Truths that you have to accept, and you gotta follow the Eightfold Path, but it’s not like _you have to start believing some god’s origin story right now_ or whatever. But yeah, he’s...apparently really into it.”

“And he left you his car.”

“Well, not really _to me_ , he kind of just left it with the family, but I’m the only one who drives it much. Mom almost never lets me take it, I was kind of amazed that she even suggested this, today, to be honest. And Dad thinks it’s a piece of shit, but I’m like _dude, look at your van_.”

It hits Hux again, almost as hard as it had in the kitchen earlier: Ren’s mother, who has absolutely no reason whatsoever to give a shit about the random kid her son carpools with, not only sent Hux homemade food, but _specifically told Ren to go take it to him_. It’s so completely astonishing, and so touching, and oh _goddamn everything in the universe to hell_ he’s coughing again. It’s already so much better than it was two days ago, the fun greying-out oxygen-deprivation thing isn’t happening and the fits don’t last for several minutes at a time, but it is still painful and annoying and _incredibly embarrassing_ , and Hux fucking _hates_ it, and --

And Ren does the...the hand thing again, steadying him. 

Because the coughing is less violent this time, he is actually able to recognize that this is a thing that’s currently happening, and that it’s really kind of nice despite all the physical misery that is going on right now. Then, astonishingly, Ren’s hand begins to move, rubbing firm warm circles on his back, and _that_ is extraordinary, that is in fact so extraordinary that it helps him reach and grab for control. He manages, between coughs, “don’t stop doing that,” and Ren doesn’t stop doing that, and Hux can...actually breathe.

Even when it’s really over and he’s wiping at his eyes, Ren is...still rubbing his back; but when he straightens up, Ren takes his hand away, and it feels as if the room has suddenly grown colder. “Thanks,” he says, wanting that contact back _so much_. “That...that helps. A lot. Sorry about this, it’s fucking gross but it’s getting better.”

“Hey, don’t apologize,” Ren says. He sounds -- worried, Hux thinks, and looks sideways at him. It is slowly beginning to dawn on Hux that Ren’s anger is a manifestation of actual concern, and this is _also_ extraordinary. “If...if this is better, _worse_ must have really sucked.”

Hux nods, leaning back against the couch cushions. “It wasn’t fun,” he admits. “I guess I should...have done something, gone to a clinic, but I kept thinking it would go away, and then it didn’t, and then...yeah.” He shrugs a little, and is amazed to find that this does not make him cough. “Phasma made me promise to call her, if it happens again. Which I will.” Even though it will feel absolutely miserable to do so. 

“If she’s not there,” Ren says, slowly. “Like, she’s on vacation or something. If she’s not there, call me, okay?”

He had been in the middle of an attempt to fingercomb his hair into some form of order, and now freezes, and a lock of hair slowly droops over his forehead. Ren is watching it with a weird expression on his face. “I mean it,” he adds. “Call me.”

Hux takes his hands away, forces himself to quit staring. “O-okay,” he says, not entirely steady. “Sure. I will.”

“Good,” says Ren, and -- flushes, the color coming and going rapidly in his skin. “Promise me one other thing.”

Hux’s heart sinks. “Which is?”

“That you’re gonna show me how to do that...skidding turn thing, with the parking brake.” Ren looks at him with wide kohl-rimmed eyes, and then adds “Not now, I mean. Like. When you’re not sick, and when I can get Uncle Luke’s parking brake to actually work, and stuff.”

Hux stares at him, and the absurdity of the entire universe suddenly becomes too much: he dissolves into laughter, despite how much it hurts his sore chest, despite how it’s almost certain to start him hacking again, he cannot fucking help laughing and it feels _good_. “Promise _me_ you’ll teach me how to use the torch,” he says, still laughing, “and I promise you I’ll teach you handbrake turns, how about that?”

“...Deal,” says Ren, and he is also smiling, and looking a little surprised to be doing so, but smiling nonetheless. “And I still get to name your stupid car.”

“Yes,” says Hux, “you still get to name my stupid car.”

 

~

 


	9. Chapter 9

_If I let you in under my skin_  
_And risen every angel slain_

\-- Hole

Ren hadn’t really wanted to leave. The idea of getting back in his uncle’s car and driving away and leaving Hux all alone in this huge empty cold edifice of a house had felt _inimical_ , somehow, and he’d wanted quite badly to ask Hux to come home with him. Instead he’d simply declared he would return the next day, and Hux had...not actually protested in the least.

This time when he arrives, bearing the good kind of Rice Krispie treats with the M&Ms in them, Hux has graduated to wearing clothes; and they spend the afternoon in Hux’s enormous room watching old-ass movies instead of doing what they are supposed to be doing, which is studying for the history test. 

You could fit a lot of Ren’s entire fucking _house_ in the footprint of this room. It is ridiculous. The bed is huge, it looks like a hotel bed, and Ren was kind of expecting it to have curtains or something; he tries not to imagine how incredibly fragile Hux must have looked curled up amid all those heaps of pillows. There’s a walk-in closet and a bathroom with one of those rich-people showers that doesn’t have a normal showerhead, the water just rains out of this grate in the ceiling, and along with the desk and bookcases and dressers and all that shit Hux has a full-size couch and half an acre of flat-screen TV, which is ideal for watching movies on. 

_The Goonies_ is followed by _Flight of the Navigator_ , and Ren is only half paying attention to the screen, because Huxley doesn’t lick marshmallow stickiness off his fingers: he sucks on them, one by one, apparently oblivious of the effect this has on anybody watching. 

(Ren is kind of perhaps a little disappointed that the Hef bathrobe doesn’t show up again. That had been both hilarious and weirdly -- _cute_ isn’t the word, but maybe it’s something close to that. Hux in his regular clothes looks more like the ordinary person he knows; in the monogrammed dressing-gown he had seemed both somewhat princely and rather _smaller_ than usual.)

His cough seems to be improving, or at least it doesn’t sound like it hurts so goddamn much, but more than once Ren finds himself absently rubbing circles between Hux’s shoulderblades; and about halfway through the second movie he becomes aware that Hux is leaning against him. And that this is because he has...apparently dozed off. His head droops against Ren’s shoulder, surprisingly heavy, and for a moment or two Ren doesn’t actually breathe.

He sleeps for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, and when he does yawn and sit up Ren says nothing at all, but it feels _weird_ to have that weight taken away again; the place on his shoulder where Hux’s cheek had rested feels oddly, unpleasantly cold. 

 

#

 

Hux is out for three more days. Phasma comes by his house with homework, and they order Chinese and catch up with English and math, and by common unspoken agreement they do not discuss Kylo Ren except in the most abstract of senses. It is a vast relief when Hux’s father calls, on the eve of his return, to say he’s going to be away for another week: the negotiations are proceeding according to plan but the scope of the planned agreement he is there to sign has expanded. Hux assures him that everything is fine. He will deal with the fallout when Brendol Hux returns: the insurance claim for his trip to the ER will show up with or without Hux’s permission, but he’ll worry about that when it happens, and not before. 

The afternoon before he returns to school Ren comes over again, and when he pulls up in the driveway, the low slant-light catching the planes and angles of his uncle’s car get Hux’s attention; he loads up his Minolta and hurries out before the light can fade, ignoring both the chill in the air and Ren’s running commentary until he’s shot half a roll of mixed closeups and mid-range. Interspersed with the shots of the TR7 are a couple of pictures of Ren himself, making faces. 

Hux wishes, sometimes, for the convenience of digital: it would be nice to be able to see whether he got the shot he’d wanted rather than to have to go through all the work of developing the film before finding out. But that’s part of the process, and he thinks that at least two or three of the low shots of Ren’s uncle’s battered little car in the harsh sidelight of a November afternoon might rival his upside-down ripples or the shot of the pond with the morning mist. He says as much to Ren, when they’re back inside, eating Ren’s mom’s cookies.

“I’m not supposed to be in the darkroom,” he admits. He has a note from his actual doctor saying he’s allowed back at school, but no exposure to chemical fumes just yet. Also no gym class, which he considers a prize of great and remarkable worth. “I figure I can maybe get the teacher to develop the roll for me, but then I’ll have to sneak in and do the enlarging myself after school anyway and pretend I had someone else do that too.”

Ren is scowling at him. “What?” Hux demands. 

“You _want_ to end up back in the hospital? If they say you can’t be in the darkroom, then don’t go in the fucking darkroom, Huxley. If -- “ 

Ren tucks hair behind his ear, looking away. The safety pins jingle. “If you wanted,” he starts again, very deliberately not looking at Hux, “ _I_ could try to do it. The, uh. The...enlarging. Or whatever.”

Hux stares, and watches Ren’s ears go pink. “Really?” he asks. 

“Yes really, you dipshit. You showed me what to do, right? So just, like. Tell me how big you want the pictures and how long you want it exposed for and all that stuff.”

Hux hesitates for another moment, and Ren does that shoulder-hunching thing he can’t stand. “I mean, if you don’t trust me to do it -- “ Ren begins, and he cuts him off. 

“No. No, I know you can. I just. Um. That’s really cool of you, is all.”

Ren un-hunches, and looks at him through the hair, and kind of smiles a little bit. 

 

#

 

It is...depressing to realize just _how_ much strength he doesn’t have right now. Hux is a little appalled to find that he has to stop halfway up the stairs to rest on his way to and from classes, and that his clothes are too loose on him. At least the teachers don’t make too much of a huge deal about any of it, and he checks in to make sure he hasn’t slipped too far in his grades and collects a list of stuff he still has to make up. His photography teacher is happy to develop the roll of film for him, but insists that the projects he’s already completed are what will be graded: he is not to mess around in the darkroom until given the okay by his doctor. Hux asks casually if it’s okay if somebody _else_ does the enlarging for him, just as a point of interest, and gets grudging permission. 

At lunch he is not actually all that surprised to find that Ren and Phasma are already deep in conversation when he arrives. They look incredibly odd together, this tall muscular blonde girl and -- well, Ren, who is Ren, eyeliner and hair and all -- but something in his chest relaxes when he sees them just talking like actual friends do, and it’s the first time he’s ever actually sat down to lunch at this school and felt that he’s part of a _group_. Not just two weirdo losers, but an actual tiny undeniable _group_ of weirdo losers. It feels bizarre in a remarkably pleasant kind of way. 

The posters for the winter formal are already up (and already being defaced, because it’s high school). Apparently this time around nobody had the strength or patience to actually decide which of the two student bands who volunteered to play the dance would get the gig, so there’s going to be twice as much mediocre music as usual. Hux has zero interest in the Snowflake Ball whatsoever, but he does take the opportunity to correct the spelling on a couple of the flyers; school dances are things that happen to other people. Probably Phasma will go, she knows a bunch of the jock boys who always end up going to these things and getting hammered in the parking lot. 

He’s more interested in the contact sheets from his roll of film, and when he and Ren finally get to the shop Hux is very glad to see that the sheets are ready and waiting for him in a folder outside the darkroom. Ms. Tano has left a note in the folder with the sheets: _these are particularly good, but remember our discussion regarding your darkroom privileges._

“Darkroom privileges,” says Hux, rolling his eyes. “Like it’s my fault the doctor won’t let me in there. Okay, let’s see.”

There are several of Ren, as he remembered, but the rest of the roll is mostly closeups and low-angle shots of the TR7. Under the lens he picks out one of them, and writes down the exposure length he wants to try, and sketches out the dimensions. “Remember how I showed you,” he says, “and remember to use the red filter while you’re setting up the enlarger. Do you have any questions?”

“Yeah,” says Ren. “What are you gonna be doing while I’m working on this?”

Hux shrugs. “Homework, I guess. Why?”

“Because you’re not gonna be able to stop yourself coming in there to look over my shoulder,” says Ren, “unless you have something else to focus on, so. Real quick, let me show you how to solder.”

Hux sits up straight, blinking at him, and realizes that he’s smiling. 

 

#

 

It’s...not that hard, but it’s _really_ engrossing. Ren had shown him the basics, how to cut and melt and pick up the blobs of solder, how to paint flux on the joint and flame it off before conveying the solder to the joint on the pick-point, how to then remember to take the damn pick away before the solder melts onto the point and becomes useless, how to tune and back off on the flame, how the very tip of the inner blue cone is the hottest part. He’d shown Hux the ring mandrel and the files and told him not to burn himself or set anything on fire, and disappeared into the darkroom with Hux’s contact sheets. 

It’s about half an hour later, when Hux is polishing his first attempt at any kind of silverwork and trying to convince himself it’s good enough, that he can’t expect to be perfect the first time ever, that the door of the darkroom is shoved open so hard it almost jumps out of its track and Kylo Ren slams his way across the shop and out as if something large and terrible is chasing him. 

Hux yells after him -- _what the fuck?_ \-- but Ren pays no attention whatsoever, running down the hall, and his first thought is that something in the darkroom must have caught fire. He turns off the dremel and hurries into the darkroom, and is relieved to see a distinct lack of visible emergency, but -- 

It’s not the TR7 shot in the enlarger. It’s the next one on the roll. 

The TR7 shot is already in the stop bath. 

Hux scarcely notices the stink of developer, or the fact that he’s already beginning to cough. The picture painted in red light on the easel is Ren’s own face. Inverted, of course, light is dark and dark is light, but that’s not enough to disguise the expression Hux hadn’t even realized he’d caught. It’s --

It’s not an expression Hux has actually personally seen, on that face. Ren had been pushing his hair back, almost all of his face visible, and looking sideways at the camera with an extraordinary, vulnerable kind of _sweetness_ that even in negative takes Hux’s breath away. It’s a completely laid-bare, open, defenseless fragility. He hadn’t known Ren _could_ look like that, and --

And Ren had been looking at _him_.

Hux stares down at the face projected on the easel, dizzy for reasons that have nothing to do with chemical fumes, thinking of a thousand things, of Ren hiding behind the hair, of Ren death-glaring at him, Ren grinning, Ren focused intently on his work. 

_Fuck_ , he thinks. 

He stares for a moment longer before shutting off the enlarger lamp and going to look for him. 

It takes him ten or fifteen minutes, but eventually Hux finds him sitting on the edge of the loading dock behind the cafeteria, hugging his knees, staring into the darkness. It’s fucking freezing out here; the air feels like knives in Hux’s chest. 

He sits down, carefully, next to Ren, and is a little relieved when he doesn’t edge away. Hux has no idea what to do, what to say, even if he were any good with words this isn’t a situation for which he thinks there really _are_ any -- “are you okay” is pointless, and “what’s wrong” is stupid, and…

...and from what he can see of Ren’s face behind the hair it looks as if he’s actually been _crying_ and that is not okay, that is not acceptable in the least, and Hux barely even knows what he’s doing as he -- reaches out and touches Ren’s back, lightly. Expecting him to pull away, but thinking of how astonishingly good it had felt, inside all that pain, when Ren had touched _him_.

Ren’s breathing isn’t quite steady. There’s that helpless juddering in it that comes with crying, even after the worst of the tears are already over. It’s desperately vulnerable and it makes Hux’s chest hurt and all he can think of to do is lean closer, try to steady him. 

There’s an awful moment where Ren tenses up completely, and Hux is sure he’s about to push him away and -- leave, again, and this time Hux doesn’t think he would be able to follow. It seems to go on for _ages_ , as if time is spinning out of control, unwinding like a reel, and then Ren twists toward him and grabs Hux and hangs on tight enough to hurt, tight enough almost to bruise, his face pressed hard against Hux’s shoulder. 

The rib-creaking shock gives way to an extraordinary unfolding spreading _warmth_ , like something in his chest full to overflowing with bright intense heat. Hux’s arms close around him, and one hand creeps up to tangle itself in the black softness of Ren’s hair, and after a couple of unsteady hiccupping sobs Ren _relaxes_ against him, all the shaky tension draining out like water. It takes a few minutes for the faint terrible shudder in his breathing to fade, but it _does_ fade, and under Hux’s hands he gives a little heartbreaking sigh. 

Hux doesn’t know what this is, only that _he doesn’t want it to stop happening_ ; the look on Ren’s face in the photograph and the warm solidity of Ren in his arms and the faint sweet smell of his hair, and the newfound ease of his breathing, and...the everything. Hux pays zero attention to the fact that they’re sitting on ice-cold concrete outside in fucking November; it’s only when he himself starts shivering enough to chatter his teeth that Ren mutters a somewhat damp curse into his shoulder and straightens up a little. “You’re freezing,” he says.

Hux doesn’t want to let go. “I’m fine.”

“I’m not taking your ass back to the hospital because of this,” Ren says, and hugs him tighter for a moment. “We’re going inside. Come on.”

It does not seem supportable, the idea of letting go of Ren, at all, but he makes himself bear it anyway, and it’s easier when Ren curls his fingers around Hux’s, holding his hand very tightly indeed. And -- okay, fine, it _is_ really cold out here, and it kind of hurts his chest, and going back into the bright warmth of the school building feels ridiculously nice. 

They go back to the shop, and maybe it’s okay that Hux has no idea what to say, because Ren doesn’t seem to either, and yet that isn’t horribly awkward. He’s still almost dizzy with the intensity of revelation, and the red dimness of the darkroom is welcoming, is familiar. “You shouldn’t...be in here,” Ren says, unsteadily. “But just. Did I do it right?” He takes the TR7 picture Hux had asked him to develop out of the bath, holding it out, and Hux takes it, still shaking. 

Even in the safelight he can tell it’s perfect. This is better than his abstract ripples, better than his pond-with-morning-mist, better than any of the other things he’s worked so hard on this entire semester, and Hux doesn’t know if that is because Ren was there when he took it, or because Ren did the developing himself, but it is perfect, and he cannot think of a way to say so -- not when Ren is looking at him _like that_ , his eyes huge black pools in the red light -- so he just puts the photograph down carefully and sinks his hands into the black feathers of Ren’s hair and kisses him, instead. 

It is not a very good kiss, but it has the dubious merit of being his first. 

And his second. And third. And then Ren has to laugh a little, wiping at his eyes with his sleeve, and tells him to go fuck off out to the shop and quit breathing all the chemicals already, Ren needs to finish up in here and clean everything up -- and Hux is about to protest, but then Ren takes off his hoodie and wraps it around Hux’s shoulders. “You’re still shivering,” he says. “Go.”

It isn’t exactly like being hugged, but it’s warm and it smells like Ren and maybe that’s good enough, just for now. 

 

#

 

It had been...a shock. 

Not just seeing his own face, in stark negative black and red, blown up to the size of a full sheet of photo paper, but seeing _that expression_ on his face. Ren had done Hux’s picture of the car first, and then for shits and giggles moved the strip of negatives one frame further along in the carriage, and slotted it back in place in the enlarger head and -- frozen. 

He hadn’t ever thought he could look like that. And it was terrifying, and _how long had he been doing that_ without knowing, how long had anyone -- how long had _Hux_ been able to _see_ him looking like that, it -- it wasn’t okay at all, and he had stumbled away and fucking _run_ out of the shop, not caring where he was going, just that it was _away_ , and found himself out in the gathering darkness of a winter night staring into nothing and trying not to think, not to be afraid, not to want. 

Not to be present, or able to be hurt. It felt as if -- it was like his protective hair-curtain had been shorn away, all at once, without him realizing, leaving him completely visible and without any kind of armor. How had he not _known_ what was happening to him -- and now he had fucked it up, of course, because that’s what he did, he fucked everything up, always and forever, anything that could be broken he would break, and now Hux was going to hate him, and --

He hadn’t been able to _stop_ the tears, hard shaking sobs muffled in his sleeve, but at least it took long enough for Hux to find him that he’d mostly gotten control of himself, just the shudder in his breathing giving him away. When Hux had sat down next to him Ren had wished violently that he’d go away, leave him alone, fuck off because _everything was broken_ and he couldn’t bear whatever Hux was about to say --

\-- and then Hux had touched him, just lightly, but it sent a rolling shock through Ren all the same, his skin flaring hot and cold with the sudden thud of adrenaline dump, all the tiny hairs along his arms standing up at once: touched him, the way Ren had once reached out to put a hand on Hux’s narrow back to try and calm the spasms shaking him. 

Ren’s heartbeat had clanged in his ears for a moment, two moments, time stretching like thin plastic, his eyes stinging, his throat closed, and Hux _hadn’t gone away_ , and then something else had snapped and he’d just twisted and flung himself at Hux in an awful graceless helpless desperate hug, and Hux had held him, and all the miserable weight of fear and uncertainty had cracked right across, dissolving into a million stars. 

He doesn’t know how long they’d sat there clinging to one another in the dark -- long enough for the cold to bite through all his layers, and Hux had been shaking like a leaf, he just _better_ not get sick again because of this-- but now, cleaning up the darkroom, Ren’s brain is working a little better. He has to wonder how long this has been a thing, how he could possibly not have recognized it, but he finds that he doesn’t actually care: that as long as he can...do that again, hold Hux, _kiss_ him, like...like _people_ hold and kiss each other...not much else in the universe matters one fuck of a lot. 

(Ren has been kissed before. Once or twice. It’s never been all that great, he kind of doesn’t get what the big deal is, but Hux’s mouth had been _soft_ \-- it’s never occurred to Ren that people’s lips are _soft_ , like that, it’s strangely exciting -- and although neither of them had had much idea what the fuck they were doing it didn’t seem to matter.)

When he comes out of the darkroom Hux is waiting for him, the way he’s waited for Hux all these afternoons, and Ren finds himself doing the vampire squinty wince thing, blinded not just by the relative brightness but by this kind of weird brilliant choking happiness he’s never felt before: it feels _exhilarating_ , the way driving too fast does, or pushing something very close to the edge before it all melts into expensive silver slag. 

Hux comes over to him, still in Ren’s oversized hoodie--it makes him look like a mouse in a tent, Ren thinks -- with something in his cupped hands. His hair is burnished copper in the bright shop lights. “Look,” he says. He’s still a bit raspy. “I made this.”

It’s...very basic, but for the first time he’s ever played with the fucking torch it’s pretty damn clean work: a piece of half-round stock, the ends filed to fit smoothly against one another and soldered into a hoop, literally the simplest ring anyone can make -- but Hux has added three tiny silver balls, remarkably close to the same size, in the “therefore” symbol. 

Ren blinks at it. He would not have thought of that, and yet it is _entirely_ Hux, and then something in his chest tips over and floods bright helpless heat through him when Hux says, more shyly, “I think it ought to fit on your pinky. Maybe.” 

It does. And kisses four, five, and six turn out to be consecutive improvements. 

The idea that he can just...just _do_ this, just kiss Huxley whenever he damn well _wants to_ , which is apparently all the time, is kind of mindblowing. He refuses to let go of Hux’s hand as they walk down to the car, and it is only with extreme difficulty that he makes himself let go when Hux has to use that hand to drive with; and then when they get to his house it takes them a good ten minutes to untwine from one another. Ren has never understood before why making out in a car shows up in so many movies, but it turns out there’s something terribly pleasing about the closeness of the space around them, the intimacy of it, a small and enclosed darkness of their very own. The windows are steamed up by the time Ren finally sits up, breathing rather hard, his mouth feeling swollen. 

“I should go,” he says. Even in the dimness Hux is really kind of beautiful, and Ren makes himself look down at his hands instead, tilting them so the green light from the dash catches in the tiny silver _therefore_ on his newest ring. 

“You should go,” Hux agrees, not sounding as if he believes it. “Thank you, Ren. For -- um. A whole bunch of things. But for the picture. You did that perfectly.”

“I did?”

“You did,” Hux says; and it takes a little while longer before Ren is capable of disengaging and returning to the ordinary world, feeling rather as if somebody has turned gravity down just a little bit for him and him alone; that he is not so much walking up the path to his front door as he is _floating._


End file.
